I was a little amazed at the sheer size of hard drive space required to install Product Design Suite Professional 2016, or whatever it's called these days (including Inventor and AutoCAD Electrical). If you include the space needed to copy and unpack the installers, it's a little over 100GB used at the peak. What was even more surprising is that there was still over 60GB left over after the install process was done, scattered through various folders all over kingdom come. That's an order of magnitude more than $COMPETITOR. I know there's a lot more to Design Suite, but not 10 times more.
Naturally, I went to digging to see what could possibly be taking up all that space. I ran Dupeguru to get a good feel for what duplicate files were there. There were over 30GB of duplicate files. So what this tells me is that the suite is taking up at least twice as much hard drive space as it needs to. The biggest culprits were default_cat.mdb at 263MB, and 16(!) copies of pskernel.dll for a total of 652MB. By comparison, $COMPETITOR only has 550MB of total dupe files. MS Office (with its labyrinth of interconnections) has less than 200MB of dupes, most of those are installers. My favorite is that there is a folder called "Autodesk Shared" that contains things like the kernel and gGeometry90.dll. These files are also scattered throughout the other program folders, to the tune of 4.7GB.
Just to be clear, this was a clean install on a new laptop. This wasn't a case of upgrading wrong or something along those lines.
First, is this normal for other users, or did my install get FUBAR? Second, does AutoDesk intend to do something about this? As more businesses start making their engineers use laptops with puny specs, this will become a big problem.
