Article by Paul Smith, Account Executive, Holcomb's
Education Resource Apple K-12 Education Sales Agent in Iowa
<paul_smith@holcombs.com>
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:
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.
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).
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
Gone fishing for the summer, 6/13/00.
"Even on the Macintosh, where things are generally considered to be
easier, Murphy's Law seems to work overtime."
Advice presented in good faith, but what works for one may not work
for all. Computers are like that. Please report errors to
Dan Knight
.
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