Welcome to the CAD Masters Blog!

AutoCAD 2011 has been out for almost six months so far. At release time, many of us at CAD Masters switched to using 64-bit Windows 7 workstations with 12-gb of ram for our primary computers. Here are my computer specs, note that everyone in the office’s are not exactly the same:

Operating System: Windows 7 Pro
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 920 @ 2.67 GHz
RAM: 12 GB
Video Card: PNY Nvidia GTX 470
HD: 10,000 RPM Western Digital SATA 300 GB

We do build all of our own computers through www.compumart.biz. You’ll be seeing posts from co-workers that work there from time to time too.

The main motivation behind a lot of us making this switch over from our 32-bit machines was the fact that Civil 3D was released as fully 64-bit compatible program. Revit has been 64-bit for awhile and we worked off of a shared machine when working with that.

How has this change affected me personally? I hardly even notice the computer itself, and that’s a good thing. Previously I would find myself watching the Task Manager or Resource Monitor during intensive operations. I find myself doing that less now, there’s just less waiting. Less worrying about how much RAM I am using, though I admit, that was sometimes exciting too. I do not have any quantitative numbers to give you, just experience and the feeling that I spend less time fighting with the computer than I would have in the past.

One quick tech-tip for those running multi-core CPUs on almost any kind of Windows:

In any Windows Explorer window, click Tools (On Windows 7 or Vista press Alt to see the menus), click Folder Options, on the View tab, select Launch folder window in a separate process. This helps keep the Windows Explorer tasks separate from all that you’re doing in AutoCAD. Simple, but it’s nice and not turned on by default.