My answer is quite simple…YES, as long as your customers allow you to!

There is always a lot of discussion this time of year about whether to install the latest SolidWorks version at SP0. Other years I would probably say it is on a per company basis whether it is reasonable for them to upgrade immediately or not but not this year. SolidWorks focused on performance a lot this year, as you have probably already, compared to other years. This is why I feel the need for companies to upgrade immediately. Now I know what you are going to say already…but what about all of the bugs that come with SP0? I feel this year, and I believe it is the normal opinion in the SolidWorks community, that this year there are not as many bugs as in years past, actually very few compared to other years. Yes, there still are bugs, but I hate to tell you that even if you wait until SP1 or 2 or 3 or 4 you will experience some glitches at some point. I don’t believe there is a computer program out there (CAD or non CAD) that does not have a single bug in it, this is just something that you deal with while working on a computer.

With the focus more on performance this year it meant a lot less on the “really cool” new features that usually cause the majority of the bugs from my experience. What you will gain in performance with SolidWorks 2009 SP0 will more than make up for the little glitches that you will experience from time to time.

A lot of the talk about performance this year is based around 3,500 plus component assemblies but even if you don’t run into assemblies like this on a regular occasion you will still see the improvements. Assemblies of that size is not very common in the company that I work in but when I tested the software in beta and pre releases and now SP0, on my home computer, I noticed a huge difference on just the day to day performance lags that I experienced in the past. These areas range from SolidWorks load time to modeling to assembly performance to huge improvements in the area of drawings. This is why as soon as I receive my DVD’s for SolidWorks 2009 I am going to implement it at our company. You can’t afford not to, remember…TIME IS MONEY!

Now I understand that some of you work with customers that dictate what release of SolidWorks you work with and that in itself is a totally different situation. I feel if you are in that situation however that you should at least let them know about the performance increases that they will see in this release. You never know, they might decide to make the switch right away also.

If you would like to see some of these increases in action check out this video and see for yourself: Get Your Job Done Faster.

So to answer this post title again…absolutely YES! If you have any questions please feel free to comment or contact me. I would love to see everyone experience these performance gains right away.