Over the past 1 month or so I have been extremely busy switching over our CAD / CAM department to Windows 7 64bit.  I have personally been running Windows 7 64bit on my work laptop since late last year and absolutely love it.  I wanted to hold off switching over our engineering department for a little while but after sitting through Greg Jankowski’s CAD Administrators Boot Camp at SWW10 I decided to push the switch to management.

Why?

When I returned from my trip to Anaheim in February I had the following mix of operating systems that I was managing:

• (3) Windows XP 32bit
• (1) Windows XP 64bit
• (1) Windows Vista 64bit
• (1) Windows 7 64bit

By having this variety it makes it more difficult to diagnose possible crashes with software and also very hard to test the software to make sure it is in good enough condition to deploy to the masses.  Also, Greg mentioned during his presentation that Windows 7 has become the gold standard in operating systems because of its management of system resources which is especially important in an engineering environment.  All of you know that Windows XP 32bit was a really good operating system, but it still is 32bit.  Windows XP 64bit was an afterthought and therefore the operating system was probably worse the Windows Vista 64bit, and well, we all know about Windows Vista 64bit.

So that leaves Windows 7 in the 64bit platform as the “chosen” OS.  As of right now the OS’s in our CAD / CAM departments are as follows:

• (1) Windows XP 32bit running SolidWorks 2010
• (1) Windows XP 32bit running Esprit 2010
• (1) Windows 7 32bit running Esprit 2010
• (3) Windows 7 64bit running SolidWorks 2010
• (1) Windows 7 64bit running SolidWorks 2010 and CAMWorks 2009

Currently we are financially planning on upgrading the Windows XP 32bit machine running SolidWorks within the upcoming year.  As for the Windows XP 32bit machine running Esprit there are no plans on switching that over but I eventually see this happening as well in order to maintain a consistant OS platform throughout.

The Setup

As a whole, I have not made many changes to the default OS settings that come out of the box but there are some things that you should be aware of when making the switch to Windows 7.  I have already covered these in previous blog posts but here are the relinks to those articles.

• Compatibility Mode
• ReadyBoost
• Run as Administrator
• Taskbar
• User Account Control

The majority of these things were available in Windows Vista already but seem to work more how they should in Windows 7.  So have you made the switch yet?  If not, what are you waiting for?  Feel free to drop a comment and let me know why you are still waiting or what your thoughts are of Windows 7 in a CAD environment.

Note:  SolidWorks will continue to support Windows XP until THE END of its 2011 release which is 1 year after Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP.