If you’ve worked in some larger AutoCAD drawing files in some of the more recent releases, you may have come across a message in your Status Bar saying “Scanning the Drawing” while your drawing takes an unusually long time updating. The Progress Bar that coincides with this message may take several seconds or even minutes to complete. Now whether this shows up due to panning or zooming in a drawing containing a large background image or if you are modeling a large corridor in Civil 3D, the result is the …

Friday I posted the AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011 system requirements as detailed by Autodesk. However, today I’m going to cover what workstation components provide the most benefit for your budget dollars and what kind of configuration is ideal for running the new Civil 3D release.
First of all, there is a huge change in Civil 3D 2011 that has the most dramatic affect on your workstation build: it is now offered as a  64-bit native program. What does this mean for you? You can now utilize more than just 3 GB of …

The following system requirements list is straight from the Autodesk website found here. Use this as a basis for determining if your current workstations have the capabilities of running Civil 3D 2011 properly. Monday I’ll be running a follow-up post with my recommendations of which PC components are the most important when determining the configuration of your workstations. I’ll also list what I would consider an ideal machine for running Civil 3D 2011 that is within a reasonable budget.
Here’s Autodesk’s System Requirements:

For 32-Bit AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011

Windows® 7 Enterprise, Ultimate, Professional, …

In either AutoCAD Civil 3D or Map 3D, we often find ourselves designing a set of plans or planning a utility layout with aerial photography in the background. Most designers will do most of their drafting with the image either unloaded or turn off the layer it is on as this reduces the amount of processing time for simple actions such as panning and zooming. There is a small “flaw” with the default settings that many people have run into with an aerial or any background image,which I’ll be getting …