I would like to have a response from anyone who is using the Subject product and their experience in doing so.
I recently installed this software. Unfortunately nearly all the products within the Design Suite have "crashed" when I experimented using them. I placed a simple array design in the AutoCAD Mechanical portion of the Design Suite and could not close the file. I kept getting a message that there was a command in progress and was unable to dismiss any such command using the "escape" key. The file would not close because every attempt to do so was met with a message that there was a "command in progress". I finally had to bail out using the Task Manager in Windows XP.
I also submitted a couple of my error messages. A couple went to Autodesk and one went to Microsoft.
My computer is somewhat outdated, as I built it in 2003. It has a new (old stock) Intel D875PBZ m/b with a (new old stock) 3.0 GHZ processor, a PNY NVIDIA Quadro FX 4000 graphics card with 250 Mb of video RAM and a full complement of system ram, which tops out at about 3.5 GB. That's as much as will be addressed by XP. I know this is probably a major part of the problem, but I thought I could at least familiarize myself with some of the different parts of the Design Suite until such time as I build the new workstation. Unfortunately every one of the Design Suite categories either crashes or runs so slowly that even just attempting familiarization is difficult to impossible.
If anyone has had this experience and overcome it with new hardware please provide the hardware you are using so I can get an idea of what to get. I will need to use hardware that can handle a large assembly, so this experience makes me wonder if any hardware outside of the governments most powerful computers can handle the project I would like to complete, even though I was getting pretty good performance from what I'd previously completed until the software upgrade to Autodesk Product Design Suite Premium.
Maybe my characterization of this software release is inaccurate, but it certainly seems to fall into the category of "bloatware" because my previous (Inventor 2011) software version handled my files without crashing or error messages. The problem remains that I won't know whether there are advantages to this release without getting new hardware so anyone having a positive experience using this release with recently released hardware, and dealing with large file sizes, will be much appreciated.
