First Thoughts on A2ki

Free CAD
Well, I thought I had seen just about every marketing gimmick around when Well's Fargo managed to top it. They are now offering free CAD software for anyone getting a home equity loan!

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AutoCAD 2000I
Well, upon returning from a wonderful vacation hiking through the Trinity Alps I arrived back at the office to find 4 boxes containing A2ki. We went and tried installing them on only 2 of the computers since A2ki erases the previous version of AutoCAD 2000. This is the first time that I can remember where Autodesk has created a version of ACAD that destroys the previous install. Personally I find this practice problematic should something go wrong with the install, but that's what they decided to do. The first computer we installed it on already had A2k on it, and we thought it installed fine, or so it seemed until we ran it. For those of you who have yet to see A2ki, one of the new annoyances is the Assist, which keeps popping up a help window for every single command. About the time it popped up when I typed in Save I was getting more than annoyed with it. The trick to turning it off is to type ASSIST at the command line and then type OFF. However it would also have been nice for this to have an expert and beginner mode to it rather than simply just off. Well, we quickly discovered that it hadn't installed correctly. For just about every single assist message it came up with a file not found error that you get in Internet Explorer. Well, we went ahead and installed it on the other machine as well to see if it would go in any better. The first install crashed about 90% of the way done. Unlike most programs, it does not install an uninstall application with an icon in the start menu. Instead you must go to the control panel to add/remove program. There you will see the ACAD 2ki. Here's where it got really nasty. If the install doesn't finish and crashes, such as with us, when you try to uninstall it, a message box comes up telling you that it wasn't installed correctly (duh!) and to reinstall it. It then gives you 1 option - cancel. In order to uninstall a botched install you must manually edit the windows registry file and remove all references to ACAD. Thankfully this was a clean machine that had not had ACAD on it previously so it was easy to track down what needed to be removed. Unfortunately this is about an hour-long operation. Once the registry was cleaned, the ACAD folder deleted we proceeded to re-install it again. Thankfully this time the install went as it should. However it then took us about 1/2 hour to track down the ASSIST command. It seems that Autodesk thinks we are all fumbling idiots who need help with Line and Erase commands and therefore make it as difficult as possible to find out how to turn off the Assist. Since then there has been little we have done with it. We prefer to use r14 in office till the next real version of ACAD comes out and they give us something that actually works the way a drafter wants it to.

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