ViaCAD Pros & Cons

just a quick review of my VC Pro v9.

started with v8 Pro 32bit, upgraded to v9 Pro 32bit. thus far the feature set seems ok for the price. platform support is odd, 32bit only for Windoze, 64bit for MAC. my PC's are either new Win7 w/ min specs to do basic things, or some decent older 32bit XP. in any event, technology is progressing too fast, thus i am building a new box in the $2500 range to help me get by next ~5yrs or so. i plan to run VC Pro v9 in a MAC vm, should suffice for my needs and work much better than v9 in 32bit Windoze.

i've had some issues with v9, but perhaps its due to running it on a not so great PC. i dont really have anything to compare to, other than my limited use with an older version of rhino3d.

I am running VC9 Pro on a 32bit XP Pro Box with just a dual core processor and 4gig RAM, and it seems to work just fine. I am running a PCI Express bus video card, and have the onboard card shut down. No more issues than with VC8 and a lot less than VC7. I have to say it was worth taking advantage of the initial discount, and the upgrade pricing. I was leary because some initial purchasers had installation and verification issues, but my install went flawlessly.