The New 2007's are Here....

Well, I've finally had a chance to spend some time with our new line of software, and thought I'd publish a few opinion points - here's a few bullets:

AutoCAD 2007:

- New modeling tools are great - having grips on solids makes like easier.
- New Dashboard is nice, but seems to slow down the system - used it all throughout my demos and acclimated to it fairly quickly - love the new loft and sweep tools
- Performance tuner - this would be nice if it actually worked properly. I'm running a high end video on my notebook (nVidia GeForce 6600 with 256mb of RAM) but the tuner didn't recognize it as an OpenGL card, and tuned the graphics down to the lowest level. After experimenting with openGL on and off, I'm really getting some mixed results, especially with shadows on and off, material appearances, etc....think the tuner needs a little tuning itself, with a better list of card info incorporated. Stick with the old displays for a while (service pack?)
- New Xref manager is much nicer than old dialogue, love the changes that show up below the dialogue immediately
- DWF references - finally!!! and if you're plotting or publishing to an image file just so someone can't manipulate your files, STOP - print to a DWF instead - it works, it's small, and users can snap to the geometry.

ADT 2007

- Space tools - being able to generate all spaces at once without picking inside of boundaries - very nice!
- Anchor tools - i.e. anchor a space to a wall, so they both update - that's nice, haven't tried it too much but would love to hear how others would use this tool.
- List definitions will cut down on the guess work involved in filling out schedules - even more standards control....
- Schedule header overrides - finally we can have headers that are both vertical and horizontal!
- Images in schedules - making legends a pleasant place to go!
- Had some weird errors - when choosing object commands, the command would cancel itself - anyone else had this problem? very erratic, but scary.

ABS 2007

- Pipe Connectors! Pat the ABS boys on the head - key to helping create an accurate bill of materials - getting a true length on a pipe is cool, and having two different ends on a pipe is critical. Catalog organization is 100% better. It would be nice if the pipe would automatically extend to the face of a fitting if the pipe end fitting is deleted, but grip editing will work just fine for now.
- Had a couple of inconsistent behaviors when connecting duct - the snap shows up but the duct doesn't stay connected (stretch the duct and the connected parts are not going with it). Happens with a 2006 ABS file is used in ABS 2007, but worked 2 out of 3 times.


All products - make sure you are using at least these parts in your systems:

- Pentium 4 2.8ghz or higher
- RAM - 1gb minimum get as much as you can in the system - keep RAM chips matched!
- Video - 128mb OpenGL or higher, the nVidia chipset works best, stay away from gaming cards.
- hard drive - the faster the better, set virtual memory to 10% of hard disk space as a minimum - defragment the drive if you haven't done it
- Windows XP - use it!
- Keep an eye on your anti-virus - real time scans will affect performance. Make sure it's off when you install the software
- Make sure you've applied all service packs to the previous versions before installing the new versions - go to support.autodesk.com and check for your software version.

Go ahead and post any issues you're having here as comments here - we may not be able to answer questions in the forum, but I'd like to hear how others are doing.

I'll follow up with more on Revit later, go to run for now.

thanks - David B.