A Newbie's Review of SW-2005

Big step for me coming over from VectorWorks to Solidworks. Having said
that, let me state the following after 3 weeks of using this program.

Things I love about SW

1. The way holes are treated like objects and just not mere solid
subtractions.
2. The whole part-assy-drawing work flow.
3. Parametric parts libraries.
4. OpenGl real-time rendering.
5. Working with models from an isometric or non standard plane
approach.
6. Piping Add-on
7. Defining parts with dimensions.
8. Design tables
9. Feature Manager
10. Overall feel of the program
11. Photoworks
12. VRML and the integrated HTML publisher.


Things I hate about SW

13. No automatic view label with the view scale, not the sheet scale
only.
14. Lack of simple drafting symbols like graphic scales, different view
and section callouts etc.
15. No simple align tool/function in part, assy and drawing modes.
16. Documentation, or lack thereof.
17. Flaky performance.
18. Flakier stability.
19. Even flakier save to pdf.
20. Ctrl-C, Ctrl-P ability to copy and paste parts, assy's,
sketches, components etc.
21. Small selection of importable file formats.
22. Cosmos can only test parts, not assemblies.
23. Inability to detach the feature manager and locate on another
monitor.
24. Detached tool menus will not stay in place on dual monitor setup.
25. No snap for detached tool menus.
26. Inability to use multiple XL tables throughout a drawing.
27. High price


Overall I just love the program and look forward to committing myself
to it. I guess I just expected this program to be a little more
polished like Adobe or Macromedia software.

Kerry Donnelly
Radiowave Industries, Inc.

 

"6. Documentation, or lack thereof."

When are CAD/CAM companies going to get the message and
start spending more money and more time on documentation /
tutorials ? What a sad state of affairs this is. How much
longer are users going to waste hours / days / weeks trying
to extract the power they paid for ? Why is this in anyway
acceptable ?

"17. Flaky performance."
"18. Flakier stability."

Not a problem for me in VX. Last version of VX 10 is like a
rock when it comes to stability.

"23. Inability to detach the feature manager and locate on
another monitor."

I'll try this in VX tomorrow and post how / if this works in
VX. I can see where this would annoy the shit out of
someone.

Do you still have the option of returning SolidWorks and getting
VX instead ? :>)

Why not download VX and try it to see how you like it compared
to SolidWorks ? Run em side by side and see if you notice how
much more enjoyable VX is to model with.

www.vx.com

jon

 

Well, it's a complex CAD bit of software ..... does lots of
things ......

HTH

 

How would I automatically filter this guy out when I'm reading google
groups? He does (almost) nothing but talk about VX. I assume he's a
regular troll and VX salesman or something?

 

You cannot.
Get a real newsreader & a real news server.

 

"Inability to detach the feature manager and locate on another
monitor."

Tried this today. No problem in VX 11 with VX Manager. In just one
release VX has redone what I estimate to be 70 or 80 percent of it's
UI.

jon

 

Tell that to my employer. At work Google is my only way to access
USENET posts. BTW, Google is pretty damn good for being free, and
after seeing their free email service I wouldn't be surprised if they
offered a nice kill-file-like feature.

Regards,
Chris

 

What you *can* do with
http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search is
to set a date range and use "without the words" wherein
"without the words" might be something like "jon_banquer".

Seems like a lot of bother to me though.

HTH