Windows 7 and Autocad 2011 - Questions

[XlhHarley]

So im migrating from XP to Windows 7 and doing and upgrade to autocad 2011 -

I have the following challenges and am looking for help.

1 - My networked mapped drives keep falling asleep - so when i load a drawing with xrefs to those mapped drives, it doesn't wake up my network drives.. but gives me an error message about not finding the xrefs.. My IT people tell me its an autocad problem, others are telling me its a server problem... most of my "fixes are not working

2 - Can sombodey tell me about  Users/.../Appdata/local/Apps/Autodesk/R18.1/enu... as compared to

     Users/.../Appdata/local/Apps/Autodesk/R18.1/enu  and how they interact?

3 - Plotting for dummies - It looks as if we go much more complicated into the land of realism on our plots, which plotting mechanism takes precident... I go to plot, all my colors say black in my ctb file, but it is still ploting color by layer

any help and words of wisdom would greatly be appreciated

[pendean]

1. Better define "network drives" please.

3. Are these raster images? Are these colors not within the confines of 256 colors as defined by your CTB file?

[XlhHarley]

Thanks for your reply

1. The network drives are living in the basment on our server, I have them mapped at R: S: etc

3. These are just the plain old 1, = red, 2= etc.. but in the ctb i have them most of them pointed to black - I have attached the ctb if you want to see it (well i tried but the board says it is an invalid file type.....)

[dgorsman]

AutoCAD will plot TrueColors (shown as R,G,B) in color or a greyscale approximation regardless of your CTB.  Check both the layer and object color values; I have seen some third-party programs override ACI colors with TrueColor equivalents without warning, so the object/layer would be color 0,0,0 rather than WHITE.

[pendean]

So these are "appliances" and not drives on a server? Those types of devices have sleep modes you can edit or turn off, explore in those drives' user documentation or contact their manufacturer website for help.

You may be able to also find 3rd party freeware that will ping your drives while your PC is on to keep them awake: try a Google search.

[Anonymous]

I am just about to switch back to xp having had numerous problems running Autocad on Windows 7.

Xrefs was one of the problems, sometimes it would find the link and other times it would not despite the fact that the path was correct. Autocad just doesn't seem to like the new file hierarchy, in truth I don't either, I get so many duplicates and back ups popping up all over the place that it becomes difficult to find what you want. We have always had an automated windows update and it has never interfered with Autocad before, but with Windows 7 whenever we have an update it seems to reset things within my cad program. It has also created problems with the plotter which also needed everything reset.

I spoke to a tech guy at Autodesk and from our discussion I came away with the impression that it will be at least another  year before the programs will be fully compatible. I am running 2010 but he said that I could only expect a slight improvement with 2011.

I haven't even tried running my Revit on it because there are just too many variables for it to change and the very idea gives me the heebie jeebies!.

[pendean]

R2011 and Win7 64bit seem to be running just fine on our PCs: perhaps you are a candidate to turn off Win7's Aero schemes (for that look and feel fo WinXP and Vista) and solving some of the issues you are experiencing.

[Anonymous]

Perhaps he has one of those Nvidia cards that has a driver issue.

[pendean]

Honestly, turning off WIn7's Aero Scheme seems to solve a lot more problems for so many users it's worth doing first, along with turning off UAC of course, and toning down R2011:
- Turn off the modeless layer palette: use the old Layer dialog box (set LAYERDLGMODE to 0)
- Turn off any palette transparency.
- Turn off SelectionCycling, SC button at bottom of screen
- Turn off Hardware Acceleration within AutoCAD, icon on the lower right near workspace and toolbar lock.
- Set hpdlgmode to 1  and/ or hpquickpreview to off.
- Change rollovertips to 0 (off)
- Set qpmode to 0 (off)
- Set SHOWLAYERUSAGE to 0 (off).

Maybe even turning the ribbon off by picking a classic workspace as a lst resort.

[Charles_Shade]

Dean you should post that list over in LT too.

[Anonymous]

We have already turned off the aero settings and actually have gone back to "classic" but it still hasn't helped.

[pendean]

And the other tips in my last post? Honestly other than turning UAC and Aero-scheme off, we've done nothing else and we are running AutoCAD version 2008 through 2011. PCs are OOTB HPs, Win7 Pro 64bit.

Sounds like you all may have bigger issues than can be solved remotely. Where are you located? Perhaps you can advertise for onsite help if your reseller offers none before you take the unfortunate step back to XP.

[byrdiel]

We are having a very similiar problem......

We are running Windows 7 64 bit C3D2011 on a few pcs with files stored on Novell servers.  When opening a sheet file with base files referenced some times the base files will not be found.  We verify the pc can see the directory and file.  In these cases what we are finding out is : if someone else in the office has a base file open the "Windows 7 64 bit C3D2011" pc will show the xref as 'not found'.  It also can not open the read only file, saying it does not exist. 

Other applications such as Word or Adobe can open read only files fine. 

Our other pcs that are running Windows XP 32 bit with C3D2011 do not have this issue at all.  If they tried to open a read only file it prompts them that the file will be read only.

Does anyone have a solution or suggestion?

[Anonymous]

We too run Novell, I have been testing Win 7 and C3D and Autocad 2011.  With previous version we had to play with the "file commit" and "file caching" under the Advanced properties of the client on the machine.  Also we have added a line to our file server that sets this at server boot up.  I can get you that line if you would like.

What version of the client are you running, I tried a new beta last week and it did not work at all.

 I am using

Novell Client 2 SP1 for Windows 7 (IR1)

hope this helps