Sunday, July 3, 2016

ACA & Windows 10 FREE ??

I would guess I am not the only one who is starting a mild panic as they feel pressured to upgrade their machine to Windows 10 (from W7 and above) because the FREE upgrade is ending soon (July 25?) Upgrading Autocad versions is enough stress for me wondering what is going to go wrong this time. (2017 version is no longer usable for rendering at this point with numerous bugs).  

So when it comes to less important issues such as the operating system upgrade when you have Windows 7 and it just works and blue screens of death are a distant memory.  I am largely self taught and something of a Systems Manager in my office and home and have taken care of systems over many years including building systems from scratch and overclocking them to get the best performance.  But I am not a natural and I have just accepted Windows 7 as it is and my current machine is not overclocked, despite a boost I would get in performance, particularly in rendering.  BUT a deadline is a deadline and Microsoft is threatening to withdraw their very kind offer to upgrade me to the latest and greatest Windows 10 for FREE and who can ignore Free Stuff?  Not any electorate I know.

So I am now staring at Autodesk's page for Windows 10 and in that style that only Autodesk can do I read.   Under the heading "
Solution:" 

"Windows 10 is not yet an officially supported operating system across the Autodesk product line."

The issues seems to revolve around the workings and version of NET framework.

Now since Windows 10 has been out for almost a year (since July 29 2015) I would have expected Autodesk, who would have had pre-release versions to work with for some time, to be on the ball.  Ah, perhaps it is just my ignorance of the deep dark issues of programming and software architecture.  Anyway, perhaps I might update this post as I go but I am intending to wade the waters and progress to having Windows 10 installed on my machine. From what I understand (little) I can download an ISO file, place it on a DVD or bootable thumb drive and make a clean install from there or you could just allow your machine to download and upgrade itself as my sister's did without really asking (happens if you have auto updates turned on).


So for now we are between the rock and the place that's hard.  If you do upgrade, you are without Autocad's recommended OS and if you don't upgrade you will miss out on the free upgrade.  Windows 7 is a very stable platform and W10 has a new interface designed for touch screens on phones and tablets. I believe you can restore a more sensible desktop but that is learning and time/effort I will have to traverse.

If you have upgraded or already using Acad on W10 I'd love to hear from you.
If I never post again on this, you could probably presume I died in the process.  My heart could just not take the strain.

3 comments:

John said...

I have successfully installed ACA2016 on 3 new workstations here running windows 10, which have been running fine now for a little over 4 months. The one complaint I have is that the brand new HP T1530 we just purchased I extremely temperamental printing out of ACA2016 and I am currently testing 2017 which seems to be working better.

A suggestion on how to take advantage of the windows 10 upgrade would be to use Windows Backup (or some 3rd party software if you prefer) to make an image of your Widows 7 hard drive. Then upgrade or install windows 10. Once Win 10 is installed it has registered to your computer and can be reinstalled at any time, so you could blast your Win 7 image back on until you feel AutoCAD is ready to run on windows 10.

Nathan Ellery said...

Thanks John, that's helpful and assuring.
I've run into a snag that my small 120gb SSD HD has run out of space and I am desperately trying to find things to remove. Even though all my documents and many programs are installed on D: drive, C: has still managed to fill up. I was expecting to roll back quickly after installing because as you say, your machine would then be registered as having been upgraded and allowed to do so free in the future.
But it's good to hear it works. I will try it out for a few days and see if all works well and I can get used to the interface.

Nathan Ellery said...

Well in the end I was not able to install W10 on my work machine in the time available. I could have wiped everything but I could not face the wiping of emails etc. I was able to install W10 on several other machines not used, either by upgrading or wiping and clean install. Even that took some effort and many tries. So I guess I will stay with W7 for some time ahead. I will be upgrading to a whole new machine mid next year anyway so I will wait til then.