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
