Win7 not as great as hype

[kmorin]

Everyone keeps praising how great Win7 is, but honestly, we have yet to switch from XPx64 because of experiencing incompatibilities with AMEP 2010. I bought 5 licenses of 7x64 w/ downgrade and have no plans, probably for the rest of the year to migrate over.

We ran a test machine with Win7x64 and installed AMEP2010x64 and had problem after problem and could not achieve a decent base install. After weeks of going back and forth with Autodesk support, we scrapped the project and went back to XP. It seemed so much of a pain just to get a fresh clean install of a 'supported' product. After speaking with other CAD managers at other companies, I found they had the exact same issues.

Curious if anyone else is disenchanted by the same problems?

[sinc]

Well, just as a note, the problems you are describing sound like a problem with MEP, and not with Win 7.

I'm running Civil 3D on Win 7 x64, and it is far superior to XP. The only really annoying issue is with Explorer in Win 7, which regularly has problems deleting or renaming folders, because it thinks they're in use when they aren't.

[kmorin]

Yes, my post was biased towards the interoperability with MEP 2010 and Win7. I am sure if it actually worked to the point where I could open a drawing and save it, I would benefit from the memory management and stability of the Windows7 platform.
I know 7 is far better at everything compared to XP and our IT guys praise it and I really like how it uses renaming files similar to OS X (leaving the file extension, unlike XP).

I guess my real gripe is with the touted 'supported platform' for MEP 2010 on Win7 when it obviously has many many issues.

[Brian Myers]

For what it is worth, it does work with AutoCAD MEP and 2010 as I have it setup and working on my own system. Of course my system is built for Windows 7 so it may be possible that your own systems have driver issues at work which are causing stability issues. That being said, beyond being 64bit and getting the performance advantages I didn't have with my previous computer and OS (Windows XP), I have mixed feelings on Windows 7. It feels like what Windows Vista originally should have been... a very good OS that is steps away from being a great one. But it's occasionally buggy with graphics oddities, sometimes a few extra clicks to get things done. But that's offset by the extras it offers... so for me its 6 of one, half dozen of another, but with what seems to be a good amount of future potential.

[RobertB]

I have to agree with Brian, I haven't had any issues with AutoCAD MEP 2010 on Win7 64-bit other than VBA issues (not surprising).

[kmorin]

Update: Created a Win7x64 enterprise VM on top of my XPx64 machine. Installed AMEP2010x64 w/ update 2 and everything seems to be running fine so far. I have had the occasional crash, but not anything significant.

I've actually been using the VM for setting up my new MEP deployments for the 64-bit version and consolidating our tool palettes to network locations. I'm very impressed on how well AMEP runs even in a VM. I started to do some benchmarking and comparing it to my XPx64 install to see how it fares.

[Elmo]

Good to hear that your finally getting results with this, have you had any further progress with regards to this?

[kmorin]

Everything is running very smooth. AMEP2010 runs at almost native speeds, but slow when viewing anything in 3d. I'm not quite sure if it's a vmware issue or not...but sometimes if Autocad hangs for a bit, it not only freezes the vm (win7), but also freezes my host OS and I have no use of input in either.

Also, the mouse movement in the vm seems a fraction of a second slower than when running in XP host, but when you move your mouse hundreds of times per minute, it feels dead clunky.

Other than that, I'm happy enough that I will probably re-image my host OS next week and try Win7 as the host one more time.

[j_follett_88]

Well, just as a note, the problems you are describing sound like a problem with MEP, and not with Win 7.

I'm running Civil 3D on Win 7 x64, and it is far superior to XP. The only really annoying issue is with Explorer in Win 7, which regularly has problems deleting or renaming folders, because it thinks they're in use when they aren't.

This is why you don't use IE unless you need to use ActiveX