trying it on for size

[Maverick91]

Howdy y'all,

I have a 30-day trial copy of Civil 3D 2006. Will it behave if it's on the same hard drive as LDT 2005?

[stephen.cowling]

Hi, the short answer is yes.
Autodesk says it's fine, but I haven't tried it myself so the long answer is probably.
I do have ALD 2005 and Civ3D 2005 running side by side.

[CNAPIERALA]

We have nearly all our couputers running with land and civil 2005 & 2006 as well as civil3d 2006. You should be fine.

[stephen.cowling]

We have nearly all our couputers running with land and civil 2005 & 2006 as well as civil3d 2006. You should be fine.
What specs are your computers if I may ask? We've got P4 1.8s with 512mb of RAM, and I'm not game to load 2006 onto it. The minimum requirements are supposed to be 1gig of RAM!

Thanks,
Stephen

[CNAPIERALA]

Most of our machines are 3.0Ghz with 768mb of ram. I havent had trouble loading it on some of the older machines here either though. What kind of error are you getting when you try to load it on?

[stephen.cowling]

Thanks Chris, and sorry Doug for hijacking the thread.

We are only running 2005, because the minimum requirement for C3D 2006 is quoted as 1gb ram. I'm sure it would be fine, but a halfway approach using both packages to avoid problems would waste too much time.
Cheers,
Stephen

[quiggle]

We are still using 2005 and have found a much higher degree of stability along with a significant performance boost by upgrading to AMD 3500 w/ 2gb ram and 10000 rpm SATA hard drives

[stephen.cowling]

I should hope so! What did you upgrade from?
With that sort of hardware, I assume you also used a good video card?

[quiggle]

The video card is proving to be of surprisingly little consequence. The new mainboards allowed for PCI express so we went with those 128 mb versions of Quatro and ATI ( we are finding no clear preference there). On the AMD 2500s we upgraded from, the video was not noticeably different between the 32 mb Matrox and the agp 128 mb ATI. The most impressive upgrade for the money came from the SATA hard drives. We are currently trying single 72gb WD Raptors. We have also discontinued use of the project tree feature as it makes the program painfully slow even with all of our new horsepower.
Even more impressive than the speed has been the stability improvement. We are experiencing very few lockups and hangs. When stalled, the program will nearly always clear out and get back to a command prompt after a minute or two.

[stephen.cowling]

Great. Thanks for the info, and good to see you are sticking with it. My design work has dried up recently. Acad and express tool make for a refreshingly simple interface after puzzling with C3D. I'm sure I'll be back on the wagon soon enough.

[quiggle]

We have determined to use Civil 3D for what it does well and pick up the slack with other programs. Point and surfaces work with no problems and the profiling is just excellent. Corridors are a bit rough still but usable and we are leaving grading ans parcels completely alone. We are doing sewers and hydrology with a good 3rd party app and for now I am exporting the layout into EaglePoint for plat annotation. LDDT is now just taking up space on the hard drive waiting for the last projects to go away. We have no plans to deploy 2006 versions of any Autodesk product and possibly beyond if certain issues are not corrected, especially the INSUNITS fiasco that is doing very vile things to xrefs which we use heavily and most of the blocks and symbols we need.