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MAc Addict Alert! How To Use SolidWorks on a Mac

Started by Josh M · 10 months ago

Oh, the trials of being a Mac user in the CAD world. There’s just no justice for your simple and elegant character personified in a simple and elegant computer. Who is out there to understand you? SolidSmack has your back and we want to show you how easy it it is to get SolidWo ... Continue reading »

79 comments

  • It always amazes me that Mac fans run out and the first piece of software they buy is a program that allows them to run Windows! It seems to me they are basically paying 2-3 times as much for a computer just to have a neat looking case, a neat light up logo, or a fun to play with dock thingy.

    When asked, most Mac users site that Macs are virus proof. Well according to a recently held contest the Mac Book Air running Leopard was the first O/S to fail virus attempts within hours of being subjected to everyday virus attempts (malicious website or link in an email). In fact, it took another day, and a further relaxing of the rules before Vista, and then Linux finally gave in a submitted to the virus. The team hacking the Mac was the only team that was able to win the full prize money because it was easier to hack then the Vista or Linux machines.
  • there once was a turd from Nantucket
    His first name was mike and his last name was puckett
    his cell phone was old
    his computer had mold
    and his software was all in a bucket
  • " the first O/S to fail virus attempts within hours of being subjected to everyday virus attempts (malicious website or link in an email)"

    Perhaps you should get someone to explain to you what a "virus" is.

    The hacking contest you refer to did try to affect the computers remotely and failed in all instances.

    Only on the second day, after being allowed to touch the computer and surf to a rigged website was the Mac laptop compromised. And it went first only because the hacker specifically WANTED the Mac laptop.

    He went on to say that he could have hacked any browser but Chrome, no matter what the operating system or the manufacturer of the computer.

    Now, the important part: this is NOT a virus. This is a web browser exploit.

    Not a virus, see? A virus is a self-replicating program that can compromise a computer, generally without needing to trick the user into loading the virus.

    If the hacker had come up with a virus that can affect OS X, that WOULD be impressive. But he didn't.
  • Linux is the future! No garbage just optimized os.
  • I just went apple nuts man - got myself a macbook air and for the first few months, I ran bootcamp and did everything the old way - then I decided time was enough and deleted the partition. No, I don't run much cad on it, but I have a workstation for that. What I do have on it at the moment is iRhino (you should check out the testing they're doing on an OSX version of Rhino, it rocks) and HyperShot - both work well.. What else is there in the way of CAD for the mac? not a lot - there's ashlar vellum, vectorworks, couple of other bits and bobs.. will the likes of solidworks ever port over? nope - its too damned expensive.. Siemens got stung with the Apple platform with NX and they're skipping releases..

    I do love this mac thing though - its kinda pretty.. Mike said "paying 2-3 times as much for a computer just to have a neat looking case, a neat light up logo, or a fun to play with dock thingy" - umm - not here, I paid around the same as I would for a decent small, lightweight laptop that actually works, the light up logo I never see and the dock is OK - just the same as the bar in XP.. but one thing is does do is power on instantly - that's worth the price differential alone. I can pop it open, work on my reviews, our accounts, email, look at videos of monkeys on youtube, whatever and as with most things, if you can attribute a cost to the time you work, and hence the cost of the time you do nothing but watch a machine boot, then it doesn't take too long to pay back the extra...
  • "Siemens got stung with the Apple platform with NX and theyâ��re skipping releases.."UG NX 6 will run native on Mac OS X. Details Here
  • This is the deal. You buy a Mac because you want/need to run Mac programs. If you want to do both Windows and Mac then a Mac is choice. I have 2 MacBook Pro Laptops and both of them out perform Dell M90 in every test but most impressively a head to head with COSMOSFloWorks. I was able to get 15% quicker calculation times with my Mac than a M90 with the same specs. Mac fan boys will say they are virus free and in many cases this is true since there is really nothing in the wild. My buddy Mike is referring to a closed competition which the specifics were not told to the public but were sent to Apple to fix them. The hacker that got into Leopard had a pre-built site that took advantage of a Safari exploit he found. With Mac's holding a 5-7% market share virus authors are not targeting Macs. It is not to say if the market share grows they will find a way in. They always will. That is the nature of software.

    Again, if you do not have Mac software you want to run then don't buy a Mac. But if you do, the price is almost the same as a PC. Sorry Mike the costs are not that outrageous any longer but they are pretty and I must say they weigh about half as much as equivalent PC laptops. ~Lou
  • Oh, BTW I wrote/hacked the driver that supports RealView that Ben is referring to. I have posted it up on the Apple Forums is anyone is interested. ~Lou
  • Hey Lou, could you post the link to that driver please?
  • I've been running sworks on my imac for a bit now, and am extremely happy w/ the performance. I have the late 07 aluminum imac. 2.8 GHz dual processor, 4 gb ram, and the Radeon HD 2600 Pro 256mb card. I'll have to check what drivers I have when i get home tonight.

    @ work I use a pc for sworks. dell precision, 2.5 GHz dual processor, 3 gb ram, quadro fx1700 512mb card.

    In comparing the two in running sworks, I don't notice any difference.

    Cost? iMac - $2150 - plus $90 dollars later for the 4 gb ram, plus $85 for XP
    dell - $2800 and thats for computer alone (no monitor keyboard, etc) plus a business program discount, the dell has a better graphics card, but that doesn't effect sworks much, except realview, which I don't use yet.

    the iMac was much the better deal imho. plus the applications that come w/ leopard and iLife blows any preloaded software on a windows computer away. (no trial software )



    I installed xp when I first got it w/ bootcamp. I only had 2 gb ram and vista being a bit to heavy of a os, picked xp. but now that I have 4 gb ram, (xp only recognizes 2.9 gb) do you think I'll see much performance increases w/ vista (recognizing all 4 gb)
  • "the dell has a better graphics card, but that doesn’t effect sworks much"

    geez, where do they find people like this? Since when does a graphics card not affect SW much? Does gravity exist in your world? Keep drinkin' that koolaid.
  • @ matt

    to clarify: obviously you need an ok graphics card, but the difference in performance between the two I was comparing makes a nominal difference in SW, especially w/out realview. I use photoworks regularly, (2007 still... waiting for work to upgrade) and photoworks doesn't even use the GPU on the graphics card.

    they find lots of people like me, sadly too many like you, who jump to conclusions and feel the need to point out somebody's assumed blunder instead of giving helpful comments.
  • Here's a great review of the Lenovo X300 that puts some of it's features up against the Macbook Air. I'd love to have both actually. Mac for the graphics/video and PC for the CAD.
  • aaahhh... Many different arguments for/against Mac, what fun! It's good that we still have the choice to buy the system we want. But when making comparisons it's tough to say this is how it is, without going into real specifics about hardware and application, or how your testing the software. I've lived on Windows long and know it good but using my MacBook Pro at home is a dream. Mac software to me just rocks, but that's beside the point. I've had nothing but good results using SW2007 with Bootcamp. And using it well, not just modeling toothpicks and candles. Great topic Josh, thanks for the tips!
  • What is this? The SolidWorks forum all over again :-)

    You have the pro crowd and the VERY against crowd. Personally as 3 Mac owner and a 3 PC owner I'm split. Just bought a new HP workstation to run SolidWorks, when I had planned on buyign a new Mac Pro but when it came down to it hard cash talks. For £1100 I get a HP xw4600, 4GB RAM, 500GB HD, Vista 32 with XP downgrade (imaging my surprise when I open the box and find Vista DVDs and Vista stickers and then think great its got Vista after all, then I start up and find its got XP pre-installed! Sorry I digress...), NVidia Quadro 1700 card, HP 24" screen (NICE screen) and 3 year onsite warranty.....For the same money you are talking 20" iMac (with warranty), which is good, but I've got a 20" iMac anyway, but the HP is a Quad core and Hypershot FLIES on the Quad.

    Laptops - I'll go with Macs in future though. Problem for Apple is that there is nothing in the middle in the desktop range. iMacs are great, then you step up to serious money (double) with the Mac Pro 8 core, and teamed up with a decent display and more RAM that takes you over £2250.

    Apple could do some serious business if they had a quad core machine with 24" screen, 4GB Ram, certified card for around £1600. I'd have bought it. Still it's June next week and the Apple developer conference where all the big product launches take place...so who knows.
  • Hi. I have been running SWX08 on my new MBP for a few weeks now and have generally been impressed with its performance in both VMware and Bootcamp. Graphics are not great when running in the VM, and I have been running into some repaint issues when running in Bootcamp, which I attribute to the non-MCAD gaming/multimedia video card. Does anybody know of any updated drivers for the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT video card that will improve SWX08 performance? Thanks!
  • hey peter, when bootcamp was in beta, there were issues with gpu support. not sure where it's at now that it's packaged with Leopard. your best bet is to go to the nVidia site and check for driver updates. you can also try to adjust some of the setting for your card to see if that affects it at all.
  • The SW CAD work that my company has been doing these days has gotten very dependent upon surfaces derived from scan data. This equals an incredible slow down in SW performance. I was tasked by the big boss to find a way to speed our work up. A hot rod AMD powered workstation was built by our IT guy and I benchmarked it with an 07 SW benchmark from www.spec.org. The numbers were not too impressive compared to our 6 month old Dell workstation. I had read alot about SW on a Mac booted in Windows XP so I decided to try it out at home on my 20" iMac with the ATI 2600 Pro graphics card and 2 GB of RAM. The benchmark results were great once I forced the proper drivers to load for the video card that was actually in the machine through Windows XP (I found the directions online to do so and it was cake). After seeing better results on my slightly out of date iMac I ordered the hottest 24" iMac I could with the newest NVIDIA card in it. The results were not nearly as impressive and that machine actually lives in our graphics department now. I did try again though and ordered the hottest 24" with the 256 MB ATI HD 2600 Pro card in it like I have in my machine at home. Once that machine came and I loaded it up properly and fixed the driver, it scored amazing on the benchmark beating the AMD PC by almost 25% and beating my iMac at home by almost 20%. I have been doing my SW work on that machine for a couple weeks now. SW 2007 had a couple strange video card type issues, but once we went to SW 2008 it has worked quickly and beautifully. I have since gotten one more engineer on one and have another on order. So far so good. I am investigating replacing our engineering laptop with a MacBook Pro or and Air, but I am not sure if the Air could handle it. We will see how that goes and please let me know if there are any questions I can answer for you from my experience of ruining a Mac by loading XP, but by having the most awesome engineering machine that tears though the surface work we do. Alan alan.morine@otterbox.com
  • Has anyone had glitches with solidworks when running in bootcamp? I have tried both running in fusion (which takes away graphics performance) and in bootcamp. I kept having a glitch in bootcamp where when i was in sketch mode, the sketch would dissapear except for the line which the mouse arrow was over. Very annoying and hard to sketch. I am using a iMac with 256mb graphics card and 2.5gb ram with windows vista home basic. Can anyone help me?
  • Has anyone had a problem with sketches disappearing? When I try to draw in sketch mode the whole sketch disappears except for the line that the mouse arrow is over. I am running solidworks with bootcamp, i also run solidworks through fusion and it works ok, but it is a bit slow because fusion sucks the graphics power out. I would really like to run solidworks through bootcamp because it is so much faster, but i cannot take the sketches disappearing. Does anyone know what to do?
  • James,

    What version of SW are you running? I had similar issues with sketches in SW 2007, but switching to 2008 resolved all issues. Are you running the ATI HD 2600 Pro card? You may want to make sure the video card drivers installed are for that card and update them if they are not. You wil find a tremendous performace increase with the proper video card drivers. I can't find the site with the how to instructions on updating the drivers. Its pretty simple if you have the ATI card just download the driver pack, run the install, you will get an error and just quit the install at that point, opening device manager, right click on the video card driver update, browse to the ati folder in the C drive and select the appropriate file that will list all video card drivers that are available and then pick the exact ATI video card that is installed in the machine. After update the driver I foudn at least a 25% increase in perfomance as well as less issues. If I come across the link I will post it.
  • I am running the 2007- 2008 version, i am not sure if that is the 2008 though. I am a student and the latest one i could get was that one. Is there a new one? MY graphics card is an ATI Radeon X16000.
  • sorry , i mean X1600
  • You can check which version of SW you are using by clicking on help about when you are in SW. I am not sure how it may be different since you are running Vista, but I bet your graphics card drivers are not correct. I have never used vista and I am not sure how to do anything in it. If you are not too attached to vista, I would switch to XP if you want to utilize SW alot. You should be able to check and get proper drivers for vista through the AMD site though.
  • what is curious to me is this, I have tried running SW in vista through fusion, and SW in vista through bootcamp. the disappearing sketches only happened through bootcamp. Everything else stayed the same, same computer, same vista, same SW, just one through bootcamp and one on fusion. Why would bootcamp be any different?
  • That is hard to explain since you are in essence running the same software from the same location, but just in a different way. The only issues I could see running it through Fusion is a lack of horsepower depending on what you are doing in SW since you are sharing the conputing resources with the MAC OS and Vista. I simply boot our machines in XP since they are essentially PCs now. I still boot in OSX on my lunch break and goof around, but for the most part they are just PC workstations now that run SW awesomely.
  • It is 2007-2008 version
  • I just got some advice that it just might be a glitch with vista. They said that running XP with fusion doesn't reduce the graphics quality that much compared to running vista. Has anyone tried this and found it to be true?
  • James, I have no glitches running SolidWorks with bootcamp... running XP, never used vista... updated drivers... updated bootcamp
  • I have only ever used XP with both Fusion and Bootcamp. I have never had any problems with either. Fusion does not allow for all of the resources to be used by XP and that is why I stick with Bootcamp.
  • thanks for all your help
  • XP did the trick. Thanks for the help... Does anyone need a copy of vista?
  • i am new to mac,wanna install SW 07 on XP in parallels with 512 ram allocated to parallels,will SW run fine or should i set up boot camp.
    I have 2 gb ram on my mac.
  • going a little bit off the topic,but please can anyone recommend me a very good introductory tutorial book on solidworks,i have started learning solidworks,and just installed on my mac.
  • I have never used Parrallels, but with VM Fusion you are simply booting off a bootcamp partition. So you install and setup SW in bootcamp and then boot a virtual machine from that partition. I would say that 512 RAM is not going to be enough to run SW decently. If you are doing anything too complicated I would reccomend booting in XP and running your SW that way because you will be able to utilize all the resources of the machine.

    As for learning SW I would say that the built in tutorials are pretty good. You can access them through the help menu with the program running.
  • Just wanted to leave a followup that I am still having serious repaint issues in solidworks 2008 when running in XP under bootcamp. These issues disappear when I load windows under fusion, but since it is a virtual machine (and thus a virtual video card) the quality is seriously diminished. What version of solidworks did the author of this article install, and does a video card hack exist for the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT? As you all probably know nvidia does not support their mobile video cards...
  • I have not run the NVIDIA cards with sucess. I tried it on an iMac with the newest NVIDIA they are putting in them and had very poor performance. The ATI cards seem to play better with SW. I also found that SW 08 seems to run better as well. In XP check to see what video card the hardware manager says is installed in the machine. I have found that it is not quite the right model drivers and so try to load the proper drivers and that might help your performance.
  • Great Success! I decided to "soft-mod" the GeForce into a Quadro, which eliminated the horizontal tearing and gives me a fully functioning system that runs solidworks 2008 with realview! I couldn't be happier right now. It turns out that the GeForce 8600M GT card shares a similar platform with the Quadro FX 570M. I followed the instruction on this site:
    http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=5...
    and used the ForceWare X 174.93 drivers with a modded INF, which can be found here:
    http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?s...
    I hope this helps at least someone, I was banging my head against a wall for a solid month before I had this revalation.
  • @Peter. Hey peter. thanks, glad you found this. I'll probably turn it into a post and give you some credit. do you have a website?
  • Peter, I have a MBP with a 8600M GT card and can't seem to get RivaTuner v2.09 to cooperate. The directions on the link you provided suggest selecting custom from the graphic adapter identification pull down and then selecting an appropriate quadro card. I only see 8600 GT and 8600 GTS as options. What did you select for this option?
  • Clint, The compatible Quadro card for the Penryn Macbook Pro is the FX 570M. Other cards might work but the 8600M GT shares a platform with the 570M, and it is the only card that I tried. You should be able to select a whole array of cards from the RivaTuner menu. Are you sure you are working in Boot Camp?
  • Got it. Within RivaTuner I had to select "0x040c" from the pull down menu which is the ID that corresponds with the FX 570M. Thanks for the help. Solidworks '08 with Real View is working like a dream now on my MBP.
  • Clint, how did you get the pull-down to give you options beyond the 8600 GT and 8600 GTS? It only allows me to toggle between those two and a bunch of cards that say "unknown device". Thanks!
  • any word on how the new nvidia 9400M and 9600M GT on the new macbooks and macbook pro will rock solidworks?
  • It works great. However the quadro soft mod doesn't work so you don't have realview.
  • I have a graphics driver that allows RealView Graphics for SolidWorks on the IMAC Windows side. Anyone interested?
  • Very interested, loaded SW2009 SP3 and lost my real view graphics, it would be nice to replace it!
  • OOOooo, that does not sound good at all. I'll have to check with my peeps runnin' Macs to see what is up. Thanks for the heads-up.
  • Do you have some details on your setup? I've checked with others and they're not having problems. What computer, OS version are you running? bootcamp, vmware or parallels?
  • Running Windows xp on the bootcamp, no virtual stuff decided to stay clear of that for now. Read lots of reports and got some mixed message's. Have been on the web and found the ATI down load doctor thing, www.downloadyourdriver.com Have decided to give this a try to see if the latest driver is on my machine for the ATI-Radeon HD2600 pro. a little bit of information I picked up from Alan
  • So Ive taken a look at the drivers and updated to the approriate ones and still no real view. I guess I will have to go without.
  • Will this work on the new MacBook Pros
  • José, hi, I don't know anyone that has tried it out, but you could try the softmod yourself with the alternate driver, then roll back to the other one if it didn't work. let us know if you do. thanks.
  • I loaded SW2009 on my new imac. Works well performance wise but no Real View Graphics which kind of sucks. Anybody know of a work around for this.

    Danny
  • Windows is turd.

    amen

    just now Solidworks crashed about 3 times on XP first time I've ever used it.
    complete bollocks
  • I found some great mac software training videos after searching for "mac video training" online. I had just bought a new mac and had NO IDEA how to use anything, never mind the usual pc software I was using.
  • Has anyone installed SW on Parallels w/out Boot camp? Also, with installing on boot camp, does it have a conflict w/ time machine? I heard time machine kills the data on the partitioned hard drive (yet I don't know what was meant by "kill").
  • I haven't heard of any issues with Time Machine and Bootcamp. If your Bootcamp partition is NTFS there shouldn't be any issues because Mac OS X can't write to NTFS. Besides, you probably shouldn't be using Time Machine on a Windows partition anyway. Time Machine creates multiple pointers to files based on changes to the file structure and if Windows tries to access the linked files it enters an endless recursive loop. So, yes, Time Machine could "kill" your data; more correctly it crashes Windows Explorer. To avoid this don't use a FAT32 partition or in Time Machine preferences omit the partition from being backed up.

    As far as running SW in Parallels don't even try it unless you're running a quad-core or better and can allocate at least 4gB of RAM to the virtual machine.
  • The problem that I am running into is that most schools have the older MAC's and the IT departments are never ready to look into doing something about it. I know MACs are good graphics machines but when they were purchased with little or no thought by those stocking the school computer labs because they got a good deal they have virtually eliminated any chance of getting SolidWorks started in our schools. Amen.
  • I would like to run sworks on my home IMac. I have XP PRO SP1 & XP Office Pro. Will they both work? At work I run a Dell T7400 w/ 4gb ram, Quad Core processor, NVIDIA Quadro FX5600 w/1.5gb. Great pc and fast too. I know it is a little overkill but....
    Will the IMAC handle the graphics and large assemblies?
    Thanks for the help
  • Programs are not going to run any different than on an equivalent PC. It's still Windows, just on a Mac. Which is unholy to begin with, but don't get me started.

    To install XP with Bootcamp you MUST have an SP2 installation disc, either OEM or retail. If you're running through a VM, Parallels or Fusion, you can run XP SP1. SW performance sucks on a VM unless you've got a quad or oct core MacPro with lots of RAM.

    What are the specs on your iMac? I have one of the new MBPros, 2.5GHz with 4GB RAM, and SW runs great. Not workstation great, but it gets the job done very well. As far as handling large assemblies that's RAM dependent. If you have a Core2Duo I'd be running Vista64 for better memory management.

    Depending on which graphics chipset you have you can do the Quaddro softmod to get RealView.

    Good luck.
  • You might try hacking the nVidia card into a Quadro.

    http://www.solidsmack.com/run-solidworks-on-a-m...
  • Yesterday I loaded on SW 2009 SP3 and now I have no realview graphics. I too run SW on a boot camp partition with an ATI-Radeon HD2600. Real view graphics worked ok for me on SW2008 and 2009 SP2.1. So should I have a go at trying to modify my graphics card. I am not much of tech-no when it comes to this sort of stuff, so I hope its easy. Does anyone else run SW on 24"imac
  • Hi everyone,

    I've got a unibody Macbook (2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, OS X 10.5.7), and I need Solidworks at university. The problem being is that I can just run it on my Macbook through Parallels or VMWare, as Solidworks crashes under Boot camp (I get a blue screen). I've searched many sites for a solution, because Solidworks doesn't work really smoothly under Parallels or VMWare. To my surprise, though, yesterday a friend of mine in university managed to install Windows SP 2 on her Macbook and run Solidworks without crashing. We opened some assemblies (which in my computer under bootcamp would make Solidworks crash) and it worked really well, just as you would expect. Her Macbook is the same as mine (unibody 2GHz Core 2 Duo), but hers has got 4 GB RAM. So, what's the reason for that? I can only think of two reasons:

    1. She's got 4 GB RAM, as opposed to me and many Macbook users who have 2 GB. However, it is really strange because I think Win XP (32 bit) only recognizes a maximum of 2 GB RAM, so having more than 2 GB installed on the computer shouldn't make any difference when running Win XP under Boot camp.

    2. She might have updated to Mac OS X 10.5.7, which in some way improves the graphic cards behaviour. But honestly I really doubt it, as the OS X 10.5.7 update log in the Apple website doesn't say anything about any improvements in graphic cards or in Boot camp. Moreover, I don't know if she has upgraded to OS X 10.5.7 yet or if she's still with 10.5.6.


    I'm writing all this because as many of you said Solidworks can't run on unibody Macbooks under Boot camp. Does anybody have 4 GB RAM and succeeded to run Solidworks under Boot camp?

    I'm really confused, because my friend and I have identical computers and while she can run Solidworks under boot camp I can't!

    The problem is that I deleted my Boot camp partition and I don't have my Win XP installation disc with me, so until I get my installation disc back I won't be able to try anything.

    By the way, sorry if my English is not really good or weird, as I'm not a native English speaker. If anything was not clear enough ask me and I'll try to explain it better.

    I'm really looking forward to any responses!


    Regards.
  • SW runs great on Bootcamp. You won't have RealView on any of the unibody Macbooks, but SW does run.

    Win XP 32 will recognize a maximum of 3.5GB RAM. Half of that is reserved for the operating system. When you install 4GB Windows ignores anything above its native address space.

    I'm running SW'09 on a unibody Macbook Pro with 4GB RAM. My Bootcamp partition is Vista 64.

    Try reinstalling, maybe it was just a fluke that you couldn't get SW to run.
  • Thanks for the reply Dave.


    I will try reinstalling XP and Solidworks and tell you if it works.

    Anyway, has anyone managed to run Solidworks on a 2GB RAM unibody macbook?
  • I use an iMac intel 2.4Ghz with 2600HD video card has 256 ram on board and the iMac has just 2Gig of ram
    I use Student Edition of SolidWorks 2009 and MasterCam X3 and Have No problem at all! Never once has it crashed or acted like it cant handle it.... Hope this helps
    Waiting for Snow Leopard 64bit! If I have read the info right my machine is able to run 64bit.... Anyone confirm that? But as I read it you only need 2Gig of ram nothing more nothing less. Its designed to work with 2Ghz and scream like you had more.
    Anyone confirm that or give me better info or website to read more about this....?
  • If it's a Core2Duo it has 64-bit capability.
  • IF anyone has any thinks a Mac cant run SolidWorks or MasterCam X3 your DEAD wrong! I have a 20" iMac 2.4GHz with an ATI 2600HD Video Card. I have been using SOLIDWORKS and MasterCam X3 Demo on my Machine for awhile now. IT WORKS FINE! I didn't have to Download any new drivers or anything special. I installed Boot Camp and Up and running in no time!!
    Oh by the way I have installed XP on several different PC computers and NEVER in my life has it been so easy to install XP on a computer. It took all of 15 min to install XP on my Mac. BOOTCAMP should be used on the windows side for installing the os. Maybe then the headache of having to reinstall windows every time you get a Virus wouldn't be such a headache.

    * You know when we go to Heaven OS X is whats used *
  • I installed XP again in Boot camp and run Solidworks. I've been working for almost 3 hours and no problems at all. Maybe I had something wrong last time I tried (usual on windows, though).

    By the way, in comparison to Parallels, Solidworks flies under boot camp!

    Thanks for the comments and the help guys.

    Regards.
  • very very funny :P
  • What's funny?
  • This is still running Solidworks on Windows, not really on Mac OS. IMO, there is still a very long way to go for Mac to be widely adopted by engineers and scientific researchers.
  • Hi I'm looking for a laptop that will run sw for about 2000. The MacBook seems like a good choice. Note the sw I have someone gave me it's the 2007 version. I'm looking to get 2008 later. My ? Is will a macbook run with little to no problems. If the macbook works what do I need to spend on windows when runing bootcamp. Thanks for taking the time to answer my ?s.
  • Question,

    When I install Solid works on Parallels it says I only hace 511MG of RAM. How do I reorganize things so it recognizes that I have more than that so I can actually run Solid works?
  • I'm not familiar with the Parallels interface or where to adjust space allocation. Perhaps another person wathing this thread has an answer?
  • What should the parttion be when I am running bootcamp If i want to use solid works?
  • Hello, I am considering purchasing a new imac 24", 2.9ghz duo, 4GB Ram, with the new Nvidia GT 130 graphics card to run SW 2009. Does anyone have any experience with this graphics card? I have seen enough posts to convince me that previous mac graphics cards would have been just fine for my needs (I don't need realview), but wanted to confirm that there isn't anything funky about this next generation of cards before I make the purchase. Is it possible to soft-mod the the imac cards in the same way as described for the laptop cards?
    Thanks in advance for any help.
    -Jeff
  • Hi, I have installed SolidWorks 2008 on my MacBook but from time to time some problems occured. Latelly I´m experiencing a kind of suspention of my systems while working on Solidworks. Also have a bad time trying to take advantage of my mac keyboard since it differs from the regular windows keyboard. Storing from time to time brings me some problems too. I´m not sure if the problem is SolidWorks on bootcamp or the partition I have on my MacBook or using the MacBook, i just have 1 GB of RAM, is this enough?. Hope you can help me. Kind regards. Agustina (Argentina)

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