AutoCAD on Virtual PC

I wanted to give official report of a little test that was conducted Monday, June 8, at Montezuma High School. The School Board in Montezuma had decided to purchase a lab of Mac G3s only if they would indeed run AutoCAD 14 under Virtual PC in a manner that was acceptable.

In the past, various solutions have been offered to Mac users to allow them the flexibility of running occasional Wintel-based applications. However, even the best of those tended to be slow and undependable at times. The caution expressed on the part of the Montezuma Board members was well founded.

We determined that the only way to find out for sure was to bring a G3 to Montezuma, install AutoCAD, and have a professional work with us and give us his feelings. I provided the G3/266 All-in-One system. Barb Long, Montezuma Technology Coordinator, provided the facilities and a copy of AutoCAD 14. Eric Doyle from AEA 6 was also on hand and proved helpful in verifying everything was setup properly on both the Mac and PC sides once Virtual PC 2.0 was installed.

The professional we brought in was Mrs. Long's son, Greg Long. Greg is a professional Draftsman who has been with the Bushong Construction Company out of Montezuma for six years. While his mother supports using Macs in the school, Greg is about as far from being a Mac advocate as anyone could be.

He has a master's degree in Industrial Technology from Northeast Missouri State. He taught Industrial Education in Hedrick, Iowa for seven years until the State of Iowa stepped in and closed the school due to low enrollment. After that he worked as a computer consultant with AEA 15 for three years before leaving to become a Draftsman professionally.

Greg said he uses AutoCAD on a 166 MHz Wintel machine at work. He cited screen redraw time as one of the most crucial items to watch for. If there was lag time while the screen responded to commands to change a drawing, the students would lose interest and the teacher would begin to have classroom management issues rather than content issues. (Sound familiar to anyone?)

Once we got him used to the one-button mouse (in Virtual PC, the Shift key acts as the Right Mouse Button - though a two-button mouse is available), Greg plunged right into AutoCAD. He had brought along a very detailed CAD representation of his mother's home. He spent about 30 minutes exploring menus, manipulating the drawing, and running the program through its paces.

When it was time for him to head back to work, Greg commented that he was pleased with the performance of AutoCAD in the Virtual PC environment. His evaluation was that running AutoCAD 14 in the Virtual PC 2.0 emulation on the Macintosh G3/266 All-in-One was comparable in performance to - if not slightly better than - the 166 MHz Wintel system he used at work every day. As a former instructor of CAD technology for seven years, Greg said he saw no problem using AutoCAD under these conditions and that the performance was more than acceptable for the school/classroom environment.

The rest of us were very pleased to find that AutoCAD did work so flawlessly on the G3. There are three items that I do feel need to be called to everyone's attention as cautions, however:

1. If your school plans to have a computer running Windows 95 all day, every day - this still may not be a solution for you. Where this is a solution is if you have one lab that needs to be used as a PC lab for part of the day and as a Mac lab for the rest of the day. For the first time, in my opinion, that option is now feasible thanks to the power and speed of the G3.
2. When installing AutoCAD in Virtual PC, make sure your C Drive container is big enough for the various items the program must install into the Windows "system" folder. This applies even if you physically install the program on a separate D Drive container (which is what we did).
3. Virtual PC has no direct connection to a printer port. When you print something from any program within Virtual PC, even the basic Notebook in Windows 95, Virtual PC takes that and dumps it over to the Mac side to print. It will try to print it on whatever printer has been selected in the Chooser. We printed to an Apple LaserWriter 8500 over Ethernet with no difficulty. However, we could not get it to plot on the school's Roland SketchMate. There are some options that I'm exploring further, however they are either unworkable for schools or very expensive. I will be updating you further as those details come into focus better.

Bottom Line: AutoCAD 14 runs perfectly on the G3 in Virtual PC mode. I have even installed the 3D add-ons and have been able to view the house drawing that Greg left on the computer from any conceivable angle. If you have pressure to buy something other than Macs because of a need for AutoCAD (or even Windows 95 itself), consider those objections nullified.

If you need further information or would like to speak with Greg Long personally to "verify" his comments, feel free to contact me and I will get you in touch with him.

Meanwhile, for what it's worth, the rep said that it's important to know and note that if a school buys the program, it will have an external hardware lock/dongle. The leased version that many schools get through their AEA has no external hardware lock/dongle. The external hardware lock/dongle requires a parallel port. This is important to note. Now, what I'm not sure of is that there may be a network version, which may put a different twist on things, too.

That's all I know at this point...Ed

Ed Stacy, Account Executive
Holcomb's Education Resource