This evening, I needed to know exactly which operating systems were supported by all AutoCAD releases from 2004 to 2011 inclusive. I have a pretty good idea, but I needed to confirm that my mental picture is completely correct. So I hopped over to the Autodesk Knowledge Base and entered “system requirements” in the search engine. Only one of the first 50 results was relevant, and that was for AutoCAD 2011. So I clicked on that. Did I get an easily digestible list of system requirements, including a list of exactly which operating systems were supported by AutoCAD 2011? No, I did not.
What I got was this:
So I clicked on the pretty picture, hoping to be taken to an easily digestible list of system requirements, including a list of exactly which operating systems were supported. Is that where I was taken? No, it was not.
Instead, I was taken to a 16-minute YouTube video. As I was not being blocked by a business firewall at the time, I could watch a few stuttery, blurry marketing images flash past during the few seconds it stayed on my screen. There’s a technical term for this kind of thing. It begins with w and rhymes with bank.
But I don’t need to tell you how dumb this is. Anybody who is smart enough to read this blog can work that out. But the people at Autodesk who thought this was a great idea? Really, what on earth were they thinking? What were they smoking? Strewth!
Could be a joke, but no… the 1st of April is over. I still don’t know the minimal config for AutoCAD 2011 because I could’nt stay 16mn watching this video but I know now why AutoCAD prices exploded this year, they need to pay people for making videos.
For system requirements, http://www.autodesk.com/autocad, then SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS.
But you wont find a comprehensive list of supported OS for the autodesk products so a bit of research is needed. Trust the almighty Google:
(2004 OR 2005 OR 2006 OR 2007 OR 2008 OR 2009 OR 2010 OR 2011) (“operating system” OR OS OR XP OR Vista OR “Windows 7”) (supported OR compatible OR Compatibility) autocad -apple -inventor
I was looking for the same thing recently, and remembered that they do not keep system requirements for older versions posted. Or at least I’ve never found them over the years. I wonder if any of it is included in Shaan’s history pages?
Since YouTube is blocked here, for everyone, for any reason (but that’s a rant for another time) that would be no help to us, even if we did want to watch a long-a$$ video. Whatever happened to plain old vanilla documentation?
Steve,
Thank you for bringing this up!
This video was originally intended to be a training session that included hardware and OS recommendations for several products. The actual link for AutoCAD system requirements can be found here: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=13784795
Evidently, a 16-minute video is not ideal, so we took your advice and updated the page with a direct link to System Requirements.
Thanks again for the feedback and for helping us to improve our knowledge base.
Leo Casado
Product Support Manager
Autodesk, Inc.
Leo, that’s much better, thank you for the prompt action!
Our website gets a lot of hits for people looking for system requirements for various version of AutoCAD, so we added a page that lists them back to AutoCAD 2000 as a service to everyone using Google to search for them.
http://www.designmaster.biz/Products/AutoCADSystemRequirements.html