Robin Capper werote, I get your point, it's poor documentation, but a couple of seconds with on the net would have found that info.
Perhaps I was being too subtle. Here is a document entitled "Autodesk Inventor 2008: Plan Your Install" bundled with the DVDs, but it has no system info.
He asked, Is it really viable testing/reviewing CAD software on such an old machine, esp something as "heavy" as Inventor?
This six-year-old computer has the following specs:
* 2.4GHz CPU
* 1GB RAM
* 500GB worth of hard drives
* nVidia 5500 graphics board (not six years old).
Computers just haven't changed much in the last six years. In my use of Inventor to date (three days), it has run just fine.
The only thing that's slow is the installer, which I'm running a third time to install the content libraries that got missed yesterday. They are needed for the tutorials.
First Tutorial: Sketching
I had tried the sketching tutorial without the content installed, and it was a disaster. Nothing seemed to make sense, based on the text in the tutorial.
But now with the content installed and the Standard(mm).ipt part template loaded into Inventor, things go very smoothly.
For a drafter of nearly 40 years (I began in Grade 8), it is irksome to keep reading the word "approximately," as in ...move the cursor up approximately 40 units.... Whatever happened to precision?
The tutorial unfortunately does not explain that sketching is meant to be approximate -- hence the term "sketching," as in on-the-napkin kind. Dimensions are later applied to make the sketch precise; constraints are applied as the sketch is created to enforce uniformity.
Bit of a disappointment here: the intro to the first tutorial implies (and illustrates) that a 3D part is created, but after I draw the 2D sketch, the instructions tell me to discard it for the next tutorial. I want to extrude it! The rest of the chapter becomes more concentrated on manipulating constraints and adding dimensions.
Tomorrow, I'll skip ahead to Chapter 3 and try some 3D part modeling.
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