Civil 3D 2009, 2010, or 2011 with 32 bit Windows XP?

[Falmarjo]

I am working to implement Civil 3D in a county engineering department. We work with mostly rural road projects (this year the longest is 7 miles), some miscelaneous projects involving county garages, parks, etc. As a recent hire coming from a private firm fed by development, I see the workflows and projects as much less complex than what I'm used to though larger in actual physical size. 90% of what they do is: topo an existing road for a surface, design a new road in the same location, make plans for bidding, let it out, give models to contractors for equipment, and inspect. Very little with respect to hard utilities.

There are 2 or 3 project managers and 2 or 3 drafters under them. All of their working machines have Land Desktop Companion 2009 (their current work horse), and some machines have Civil 3D 2009. We have subscriptions for all current Civil 3D software.

Which version should I start with given the following constraints:
- Our IT won't support Windows 7 (64 bit) as they haven't been authorized for those upgrades by elected officials. They would install it, but our department would be on our own to fix bugs with respect to software and driver incompatibility. I'm not sure if we're willing or able to fly solo on that front - but maybe we could be talked into it.
- Our current machines run Windows XP (32 bit) (not sure we have the "switch" to give us 4 MB of RAM)
- We think we'd like to use the new 2011 survey database features to manage points, but we can live without that if it means crashing every 30 minutes.
- Licenses: We have a subscription for whatever we want, but as you all know, that's just part of the answer.

Most of what I read seems to strongly recomend that 2011 be run with Windows 7 for the additional RAM, but can we establish procedures that will allow us to work in Windows XP (32 Bit)? Is 2011 worth the hastle? If not, should we upgrade to 2010 or just leave everything at 2009 until we get the necessary upgrades to meet the recomended system requirements - maybe in years?

Given our limited use, maybe 2011 won't be that great of an improvement over 2009. I can't tell if most people are using 2011 or not.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[sinc]

Win7 is pretty easy to use - much easier than XP. But you can get into trouble if you just install Win7 on old hardware. Depending on what sort of hardware you have, it may or may not be a good idea. Also, if you have old printers you need to use, you'll probably want to check and see if they have 64-bit Vista/Win7 drivers. As far as supporting Win7 itself, that's not much of a concern, unless you try to put it on hardware that doesn't support it.

If you're stuck on 32-bit XP, it's difficult to advise... With that OS, people might be having the fewest problems on C3D 2009. C3D 2011 supposedly uses less resources than C3D 2010, and might theoretically run better on 32-bit XP, but I haven't tried it myself. I've heard complaints from people trying to run C3D 2011 on 32-bit XP, but there's enough variables that the picture is murky. We still haven't hit the first SP for C3D 2011, and I don't think many people have made the jump yet (since we've had so many years of being trained by Autodesk to not trust a release until after the first SP).

[jpaulsen]

Does anyone else have any input here?

I may be in a similar situation as the OP. We are currently on Win XP 32-bit and will not be upgrading our OS any time soon (at least 1 year). I am considering upgrading to Civil 3D 2011 and am wondering if anyone has first hand knowledge of how it runs on Win XP 32.

[gandocadguy]

I'm currently running civil 3d 2011 on 5 computers for survey work. 32 bit VISTA. and it seems to function as well or better than 2010 was.

I'm currently running civil 3d 2011 on XP 32 bit creating templates and deployments. We're jumping from 09 to 11. 11 seems to run better on my 2011 32 xp machine and flys (if civil 3d can fly) on my 8GB windows 7 64 bit laptop.

I work two jobs using two different versions of the same software on 3 different operating systems. Times are tough.

[civil3Dguide]

How do you plan to implement the change to using C3D 2011? If everyone is using LDT, do they want to jump to C3D, who is training them? Currently from what you've said I would advise you to continue using what you have, unless everyone wants to completely jump to C3D.

We have over 3 dozen computers running Windows 7 64bit and C3D 2011 64bit, no problems at all, but these machines are not in a production environment. However we support hundreds of users, and advise everyone who ask this question, to go to Windows 7 64, and C3D 64. But you said you can't get Windows 7, so you'll be on 32bit XP which should be fine, unless you have 2 gigs of ram or less. I would be more concerned with the transition from LDT to Civil.

2009 is not as good as 2011 of course and it doesn't have the same functions, take the 2010 version out of the equation. With your current software having LDT and C3D 2009, it may be easier to make the transition completely to civil, if you jump to 2011 you will have no LDT companion as a crutch, which could be good and bad!

To clarify; anyone that is hesitant to jump to Windows 7 and Civil 3D 2011 64 bit versions, don't be,it works as good if not better than what ever you have now! Unless you have hardware that is below specifications to run these two products.

[jpaulsen]

Christian,

Thanks for the reply.

Our only hesitation to upgrade to Windows 7 is financial.

Most people in the office are 100% Civil 3D. There are few stragglers but even they have used Civil 3D a little bit. We will be keeping LDT 2009 on the computers to work on legacy projects. I anticipate needing to keep LDT on all the workstations for about 2 years then after that it will be installed on one common computer.

All of our computers have 4GB of ram and we use the 3GB switch.

The feed back I've been getting has ranged from "don't upgrade" to "it should be fine". I was really hoping to get input from someone who is using C3D 2011 on XP 32 in production but I guess no one that frequents AUGI or the Autodesk DG's is using that combination.

[civil3Dguide]

I don't use it on an XP machine, but I have a lot, probaly hundreds of users that are using it on XP machines and if their was any issues I'm sure I would be hearing about them since we do free support for almost all of our clients. I'm sure if they were crashing or having any other real problems they would be calling, and they are not.

Seems to me you have a good plan. What about putting it on a test computer and see if you have any issues after a month? I expect you will not, even without any updates 2011 is a great version, and I would say is more stable and uses recourses (ram) better than the 09 version.

The new features are worth the risk to me, considering you do road designs.

[civil3Dguide]

And; Windows 7 is taking over the world! So as quickly as possible people are upgrading to that version, so this probaly has something to do with the lack of responses. I understand why you guys can not upgrade at this time.

[jpaulsen]

Thank you. That is the kind of feedback I was hoping for. I am feeling a little more comfortable with the upgrade now.

I plan on doing some non-production tests before I install it on all the computers. However, I'm not willing to test it on a production project because of the lack of compatibility between the versions.

[civil3Dguide]

There is a C3D 2011 New Features set of videos on my YouTube channel you could check out as well, if you would like to see the new feature of 11. It is not very good, but I think I covered pretty much everything! The link is below.