johncruet

Make sure you have at least 96 megs of free ram available prior to your opening VectorWorks. I had a problem where I had Vectorworks and another program (MS PowerPoint) open at the same time and the demo I had wouldn't render. Once I closed PowerPoint the rendering was fine. 14 seconds to render a 1.6 meg size model! My client was impressed!

Make sure you have at least 96 megs of free ram available prior to your opening VectorWorks. I had a problem where I had Vectorworks and another program (MS PowerPoint) open at the same time and the demo I had wouldn't render. Once I closed PowerPoint the rendering was fine. 14 seconds to render a 1.6 meg size model! My client was impressed! ------------------ JC/AIA

Make sure you have at least 96 megs of free ram available prior to your opening VectorWorks. I had a problem where I had Vectorworks and another program (MS PowerPoint) open at the same time and the demo I had wouldn't render. Once I closed PowerPoint the rendering was fine. 14 seconds to render a 1.6 meg size model! My client was impressed! ------------------ JC/AIA

1.7 meg file size wireframe on a Powerbook G3/400 Pismo rev.2 takes all of 12 seconds from execution to completion. On a 7300/180, this same model takes 4 minutes. This is Lightworks Raymaker, folks! Now, how long did it take for my colleague with his autoCad shade/shadow rendering and his pentium pro 200 meg. machine to render his 600K model? A full HOUR! I think I have something to sell here. ------------------ JC/AIA

How about floating windows or palettes for layer management and class management? Such windows could be collapsed with a click of the mouse. It would make the visibility and invisibility of classes very convenient. Especially if you decided to opt for translating an AutoCad document converting DXF layers to classes. JC/AIA

To clean up corners where lines (not walls) intersect, I have to: 1. Select both lines 2. Hit "command--J" This technique goes back to MiniCad 5 or earlier and hasn't really evolved! Isn't there a better way? ------------------ JC/AIA

Not so in my case. When I first installed WV 8, I found I had to rebuild the desktop- at that point, the icons didn't show up properly! The program ran fine when I rebuilt the desktop. I had to execute a similar desktop rebuild when I installed 8.5. Now here's something strange- when I installed VW 8 on my PowerBook 190 with OS 8, I didn't have to rebuild the desktop at all! In general, this is good practice once you complete the install of a major program. ------------------ JC/AIA

I agree- VectorWorks is slower than MiniCad. Each successive feature has made it increasingly difficult to run this program on weaker machines, such as my PowerBook 190. Perhaps the best suggestion I can give is to try to evaluate what features in the base VectorWorks you can live with. Make certain that you installed the version of VectorWorks that is most appropriate for your machine. In my case, VectorWorks 8.0 successfully loaded into my PowerBook 190, but it does not include the QuickDraw 3D facility. Also, I run the streamlined AEC workspace. Hey, I can still use the multiple edit/ associative dimensioning features, so what the heck? I can even create walls from polygons, although this feature runs slower than it does in my 7300/180 desktop. If your program feels dogged, try those approaches and I believe it will cause an increase in speed and performance to more tolerable levels. ------------------ JC/AIA