auto cad? auto cad mechanical? pros & cons

[Anonymous]

I work for an offshore pedestal crane company. We bought the inventor 8 package and still haven't used it. Over the last couple weeks I have been trying to find a more efficient way of drafting and came across autocad mechanical 2004dx. can someone please give some examples of the pros and cons of this program as opposed to autocad
thanks in advance
tommy

[Anonymous]

Hi Tommy, Please take a look at the product website at www.autodesk.com/autocadmechanical. There is a productivity study comparing AutoCAD Mechanical with AutoCAD. We also offer a test drive for the 2005 release that guides you through a real design situation with AutoCAD Mechanical, showing you the functionality along the way - call your local reseller or find the closest reseller on autodesk.com to get a copy. Cheers, Eric "tommy5" wrote in message news:26669183.1093971938141.JavaMail.jive@jiveforum2.autodesk.com... > I work for an offshore pedestal crane company. We bought the inventor 8 package and still haven't used it. Over the last couple weeks I have been trying to find a more efficient way of drafting and came across autocad mechanical 2004dx. can someone please give some examples of the pros and cons of this program as opposed to autocad > thanks in advance > tommy

[Anonymous]

mechanical is no doubt a powerful program, and has it's applications and uses. However, I expected it to do more for us than it actually did. Be sure to have your supervisor(s) around when you're using the test drive. I expected to save a bunch of time by being able to insert fitting's and the like from an integrated menu. However, my boss doesn't like the way mechanical depicts the fitting's, and still has me drawing them so that the threads are shown in more of a realtime view than a true 2D perspective, with the hidden lines and such. (which is how mechanical desktop shows them)

[Anonymous]

Thanks for that info. I will be sure to bring that up in my next meeting

[Anonymous]

*this response was originally in the serivce pack thread, but this is a more appropriate place...
+++
i am having lots of problems with the following items in AutoCAD Mechanical 2005..

Match properties functions not working properly.

My grips keep turning off.

The associative hide doesn't work with xrefs.

The associative hide blows me out of mechanical if i select more than say 3 items at a time.

My delete key only works sporadically.

Mechanical dimensions and leader lines (among other possible objects that i haven't discovered yet) show up as proxy objects in AutoCAD 2005.

Random xref errors ranging from file management, not loading properly at drawing start and getting blown out of Mechanical when accessing xref manager.

when i doubleclick on a text object to change it, the text editor doesnt always open.

the enhanced attribute dialog box is *super slow* coming up and at times everything typed into the dialog box doesnt appear on the screen (even after hitting apply and ok). the timing of the dialog box and the WYSWYG is way off and its possible to type faster than the text update appears on the screen. the text gets truncated at random points during typing and you have to go back in a second time to fix it.

i woud like to be able to turn off the "enhanced" editors and select the ones i like-manually overriding the mechanical presets whereand when desired.

overall its a good package, but there are a lot of things that need to be improved-hopefully sooner than later for me to be happy with it.

daniel
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Pentium 4-1.6 ghz, 1gb ram, radeon 9200 128mb video card
windows 2000