ACAD to Intellicad

I've been told Carlson with Intellicad is close but not quite ready for primetime. If you have the time it could be a good option otherwise I would go straight to Survey with embedded acad. In either case I don't think you need to bother with XP Mode just go straight to Windows 7 Pro if you can still buy a new computer with Windows 7 instead of Windows 8.

I checked on Dell and they still offer the premium computers with Windows7 but the cheaper desktops seem to only have Windows 8.

We had almost no trouble at all switching from XP to Windows 7.

I tried to make the switch about a year ago when I made the move from XP to Win7-64. I was coming from LDD 2i with AutoCAD 2000 and most of the differences I saw were changes that have also been made to AutoCAD. Plotting was the one area that I found to be underdeveloped at the time. I use an HP Laserjet for small drawings and an HP Designjet 800 for large format. It had very few options, printed wipeouts as black rather than transparent, and was painfully slow. I was very busy at the time and didn't have the time to devote to figuring out the quirks so I ended up running Carlson on AutoCAD 2013. Expensive in the short run but I can run Carlson over both Intelicad and AutoCAD, and when it comes time to upgrade AutoCAD again I can re-evaluate them side by side and make a decision.

Jim Frame's postings on this are worth a read:

[msg]200294[/msg]

Hopefully he will have additional comments.

I bought Carlson Civil Suite w/ Intellicad 3 years ago. Used to be an ACAD LDD guy.

I like it a lot. I use it for both surveying and engineering. Very powerful stuff. I haven't had any issues that I consider significant. Pretty seemless transition from ACAD to ICAD as many of the basic CAD commands are identical.

I very much recommend Carlson w/Intellicad. Great tool. Carlson makes a great survey and civil product and I don't really see a big deal between whether you get it with ICAD or ACAD other than one is significantly less expensive.

I tried to switch several months ago but gave up after a couple of weeks. If you are only doing fairly simple mapping, it may not be too painful. I know many on the board are happy with icad but I found too many issues when I gave it a shot.

I migrated from Land Desktop this winter and gave Intellicad an honest try. A lot of nice features, but I found myself calling support two or three times a drawing dealing with bugs. Large coordinate drawings caused all kind of problems with basic move and copy commands. Text and hatching also went haywire. I broke down and cross graded to the embedded version this spring and haven't called support once. A lot of the shortcut commands were missing, but I found a past thread that explained how to overwrite the surv.pgp file, so that most of the old LDD shortcuts worked.

I tried the intellicad version and think it could be used successful in a simple office. I chose the embedded cad though. 20113 is a solid release

> I tried the intellicad version and think it could be used successful in a simple office. I chose the embedded cad though. 20113 is a solid release

[sarcasm]
I sure hope it is a solid release. If all the bugs aren't worked out in 18,100 years then they need new programers.[/sarcasm]

I went from a ACAD version to IntelliCad very recently. It seems like a pretty straight forward transition.

I really haven't noticed anything from ACAD I really miss other than the stock ACAD fonts. So far, I really like the Carlson running in IntelliCad.

Edited to add one additional "really" because there were not enough.

They actually might get it right by then. Seriously, they have really improved intellicad in the last few releases

I have been running ICAD for about a year. I don't miss AutoCAD. I have even loaded some rather large LIDAR grids and it seemed to run OK. I would say that its not quite as stable as ACAD, but as long as you save periodically, its no big deal.