SW2008

I just received my SW2008 and started to load it then thought I'd better
ask.

Can I load SW2008 and still keep my SW2007 up and running on the same
machine without any problems? I'd like to load SW2008 and play around with
it some, but I can't afford to be down or mess up my SW2007 right now for
customer compatibility reasons.

Thanks,

Joseph

 

Along these lines, I recently thinstalled SW2007, completly USB
portable and only about 300mb, all help and addin's ripped. With
everything, it's a lot bigger. Just playing around with this, it could
be useful to have a few SW versions; all are independant and can be
run simultaneously with no problems, independent virtually registries
and file structures created at runtime (files save to real hard drive
or USB). Its a neat program www.thinstall.com, on the website they
show demos of the MS Office suite thinstalled, running of off USB,
licensing, services, everything needed is run with the program, don't
know how it works, I tested it with SW2007 and SW works fine on a
clean machine, just by running the 300mb exe file, it only takes a few
seconds more to start up, but runs just fine.

One other suggestion is to use a virtual machine, Microsoft Virtual PC
2007 is FREE from microsoft, download it, about 30mb, create a virtual
PC, install xp, on it, it uses all your hardware, same everything, put
in 2008 and install it, test it out, you can switch back and forth
between virtual PC and real PC with no problem and discard change to
the Virtual PC if you don't like changes you have made since the last
bootup. Use it to test anything you are unsure off. You can drag and
drop files between PC's and share the Virtual Harddrive on a network.

 

Yes you can install 2008 along with 2007. Just make sure that you back
up your common parts/files before using 2008. The other thing to do is
to change the file locations of these file in 2008 as well. When you
install 2008 it will assume file locations and settings from your
current version that is installed so you have a potential for
overwriting 2007 files and once they have been saved in 2008 you can't
use them in 2007.

 

you sure can. We typically always keep the older version on hand just
as a safety precaution in case there is an issue with a file on a new
version. It's kind of a murphy's law situation. If we uninstall the
old version and replace with the new... you are doomed to have major
issues. However, we find keeping the older version installed, we
never have to use it.

anyways with that, I suggest you change a couple things durring the
installation options. When you get to the dialog box with the program
install directory and the common files directory, change them to be
version specific.

For example for 2008 we would do this.

default for program files \Solidworks -----> \Solidworks 2008\

default for common files \Solidworks Data ------> \Solidworks 2008
Data

This separates the info needed for each installation clarifies which
one you are using.

Don

 

Thanks! How does this effect my licensing/authorization? Obviously I don't
want
to deactivate SW2007. Do I need to do anything for this?

TIA,

Joseph

 

I'd also suggest installing each version of SolidWorks in a dedicated
directory which, for example, can be named SolidWorks 2006, SolidWorks
2007, SolidWorks 2008 and so on.

If multiple versions are simply installed using the default C:\Program
Files directory destination, then the result is for the first
subdirectory to be named SolidWorks and subsequent versions to share
some of the original folder's files while creating another (i.e.
SolidWorks1) alongside. This behavior I find makes management and
review of the installed files awkward as well as confusing. It can
also make things difficult if the manual removal of a particular
version of SolidWorks is performed...

Per O. Hoel
____________________________________________

 

One other word of caution is if you use Toolbox, place these files in a
separate folder from your 2007 installation as it will overwrite any
part files with new 2008 versions and will then make them non usable for
2007.

 

No, unless something has changed in SW2008. My coworker didn't mention any
such problem when he installed SW2008, so you should be good to go, so long
as you follow the advice about keeping the installations separate.

Jerry Steiger