AutoCAD 2004

[RJLDesign]

Fellow CAD users

the director of the firm i work for has asked me to look into upgrading to AutoCAD 2004. We currently run 2002 and find it stable and meets all our needs.

Has anyone heard about anything fantastic or not so fantastic about 2004.

I cant very well ask the dealers here in brisbane as they all think there product is rock solid. And many firms here in Australia are reluctant to upgrade there licences with new versions as its so expensive.

Any information you could share would be great.

Thanks

Rj

 

[Binary]

Take a look at thread555-61462 which discusses this. Dunno if it answers your question completely but it's a start.

 

[cadshite]

I would say no it's not worth it. All you really gain is:

1. Indent margins on MTEXT
2. More colours (plotter must be up to it)
3. Better refernce editing facilities (not much though)
4. Quick render in paper space (not the best quality)
5. It comes with express tools (v.good but most people have this and it isn't any diff from 2002 really)

These are the main changes that I've come across.
However when you edit an Xref in a drawing with it in, it doesn't save as, say Ac 2000 (or whatever you specify in tools/options/open&save) it seems to efault to 2004 - meaning someone with ac2002 downwards will open a dwg without the Xref in; which is nice.
It's a lot of money for little gain in my opinion.

 

[ccst]

We upgraded to 2004 about 3-months ago. It appears to be much faster. Features include Express Tools....great! Bad news is you can't save files to an R14 format, you have to save to 2000 format, then from version 2000 save to R14. Rather stupid, because so many others want files in R14 format - where plotting was simpler, or they've never upgraded. I keep all versions "running" so that I am able to address this problem. AutoCAD can be incredibly silly.

 

[IFRs]

We upgraded to 2004 a few months ago also. At first I was skeptical, but as time went on I found more and more to like about it. I have found that several threads in this forum have been answered with "R2004 does that". There are many small things, both 2D and 3D that are minor improvements in and of themselves, but in aggregate make 2004 much better than 2000. I'm happy we made the switch.

 

[cadshite]

IFRs, he's on 2002 which is much closer to 2004. If you had 2000 (before 2000i) then 2002 would also be a big improvement.

 

[CDH]

One great thing is the file sizes.
In my experience they are generally about 1/3 of the original file in pre-2004
For example, I had a 1.2 MB file that I open and saved in 2004 and the file size was reduced to about 300k

There are a lot of other good things, but some of them may seem minor.