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Peter, Whilst I don't consider the software much of a blessing these days we have never had to worry about saving all the time in AutoCAD. It crashes probably 5% of the time VW does, although I realise it is much less advanced. Panta, Our projects are primarily large senior schools. The VW drafters here said that it became rather sluggish to do even general operations after they got to a certain stage of development, and these are all new machines not of a low spec by any means. We are quite open to the idea of moving to MacOS, and already have a quote for refitting all the drafting stations with Mac Pro towers if we were to move to VW. A few employees here have been pushing the switch for quite some time now but we're hindered by ACAD being Windows only. Indeed they started fresh. They even tested it on other machines but all seemed really quite flaky. ArchiCAD and Bentley? I'll have to look into them. I am only going on the suggestions raised by our drafters. Ray, I believe one of the drafters registered here to get help, at least I must assume so. Perhaps we should look into trying VW in Vista if you're having a better experience.

Our situation is this; we have an office equipped with 30 XP-based workstations running ACAD Arch-Desktop 02. It is obviously out of date, and we are looking at alternative solutions (however different from ACAD they may be). We are not concerned with having to re-tool/tutor our CAD staff if the benefits are substantial enough. VW, on paper, offers these benefits at a fraction of the price of alternative products. In practice however it appears these benefits are marred by the constant problems the software seems to suffer from. In example we bought two seats of VW Arch 09 to test the program thoroughly, and over the last two or three months we've had two drafters (that were already from a VW background) test it out. The results are less than spectacular. Yes, the drawings look much better. Yes, they can seemingly produce 100 times faster than our ACAD guys whilst also getting more information into the drawings (we are impressed with the ideas behind BIM and wish to implement it fully). But what good is any of that if the drafter is so scared of his station crashing that he must attempt to save before and after almost any operation? I saw one drafter have his VW program crash over and over again, seemingly randomly, and not even doing what I would consider a complex operation (he was adding a detail tag one time, and another simply tried updating a rendered viewport). It's not as if it's the same type of error all the time, either, as you'll sometimes see "illegal instruction" and other times see something related to VBbasic or some such coding languagey thing. The entire program "feels" unstable and badly put together. And yes, we've spent hours on both this board and the tech support line in hopes of making the program more stable, but if anything only found more evidence on the contrary here on these boards. Our computers are fine according to NNA. I suppose my questions are as follows. Do the above statements of instability ring accurate to your ears? Do you have a better experience with VW? Would switching to MacOS fix some of it? Or would you simply recommend something else? Our current options are as follows: ACAD Arch 09, Revit 09, Arris, or VW. I personally would rather we switched to VW purely because it seems focused more towards design/architect types as opposed to people who prefer computer game style CAD. So please, if you can lend any helpful words, they'd be greatly appreciated.