Get optimal CAD Software install after a reformat

[mdhutchinson]

We are looking at reformatting a number of computers and then re-installing Autodesk Building Design Suite Ultimate... AutoCAD MEP, Revit MEP and Navisworks Manage / Freedom.

And, this time the end goal is to get the absolute best performance out of a CAD machine when it's handed over to the CAD Detailer.

Has anyone experimented with a best practice installation?

... I.e.. Reformat and load only SO and Windows Updates... then the CAD software, then the remainder of the Corporate software, I.e.. email, MSOffice, Corporate Virus protection, and other misc software.

The idea is to have the largest chunks of free disk space to run the installation. The installation I would presume should use the largest free diskspace in which to install the software. Windows 7 supposedly does not move chunks larger than 64 MB when defraging, so the cleaner the disk is when doing CAD software installation the better the software stays together on the disk - and then the smoother quicker performance from the software can be achieved.

I'd be interested in getting others thoughts.

[dgorsman]

For our engineers and others who don't need the full-on soup-to-nuts installs, everything they need can be done with silent deployments.  Its not much so it doesn't take a lot of time.

A number of our third-party add-ons don't "deploy" silently, at least not without endless fiddling with other applications, and so on.  So we install whatever is considered necessary to a base image, then clone that.  There was some consideration to pushing out the image over the network, but limitations made it more practical (and faster) to just clone the master image to a fresh hard drive and swap that out.  Once the clone is deployed then IT can push whatever is left.