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This Month
Tips & Tricks Downloads, Hotfixes, Service Packs & Other Issues DWF viewer and Design Review service packs for Internet Explorer 7 compatibility, New 3D Spaceball controller software, 4 Inventor hotifxes, AutoCAD Word OLE hotfix Last month's competition results and another competition giving you the opportunity to win a piece of nostalgia. Vault Viewer and Non CAD Client Are you using Vault? Do you have non CAD users who need to view your vaulted data? Do you have a need to use vault on independently of CAD. If you have any of these requirements there is an independent Autodesk vault client available for purchase. At £400 + VAT the reviewer client includes design review, formerly dwf composer. Subscription for this is £75 per license per annum. A concurrent network license is also available, at just £475 per license. If you would be interested in finding out more please contact support@microconcepts.co.uk. Free Inventor Training - Parts Lists and Bill Of Materials Structuring The next in our series of Micro Concepts live web training seminars will take place on Thursday 7th December between 11:00a.m. and 11:45a.m. This seminar will be showing the different Bill Of Materials and Part list structuring options within Inventor. This web training seminar is available free of charge to customers with current support contracts. Details and registration can be found here. New Technical Support Engineer This month we have a new engineer joining the Micro Concepts team to help us further increase the level of service we are able to provide you. Andy Walker joins the support team bringing with him a wealth of experience in installing, implementing and supporting client/server database management applications. Andy has also been responsible for CAD design, support and customisation in a previous industry role. Support Phone System Upgrade On 11th and 12th December the Micro Concepts phone system is being upgraded. This will not affect how you access the support desk, with the direct support line number remaining as 01223 716214. However during these 2 days there may be periods where the phone system will be unavailable. We apologise in advance for any delays in service this may cause. email, web and fax access will not be affected and will be available for logging new calls or updating existing open cases.
It's getting close to that time of year again. We know the majority of you close between the Christmas and New Year periods but for those that don't here are the days when support will be available:
Monday 25th December - closed The Micro Concepts team would like to take this opportunity to offer our seasons greetings and thank you for your continued business during 2006. We look forward to working with you again in 2007 and onwards. New Space Controller Range Released 3Dconnexion, has revamped its product line with new products, new software and new pricing. On November 28, 2006, 3Dconnexion introduced two new 3D navigation devices, SpaceNavigator and SpaceExplorer, and complete a product line refresh begun with the introduction of SpacePilot in 2005. The entire product range now consists of the SpacePilot, SpaceExplorer, SpaceTraveller and SpaceNavigator. SpaceExplorer
RRP £199 SpaceNavigator
SpaceNavigator makes advanced 3D navigation accessible and affordable for architects, artists, designers, enthusiasts, students and anyone else who wants to enjoy the 3D experience using Google Earth, SketchUp, or more than 100 of today’s most popular and powerful 3D applications. RRP £69
Autodesk Beta Program
If you are an Autodesk subscriber you may already know about the
Autodesk beta site at:
http://myfeedback.autodesk.com
AutoCAD 2008 - Spago
These codenames can be entered on your application to indicate
the beta project you wish to join. New Sheet Metal Tips Document Peter Barker has created a new Sheet Metal technical document showing how you can combine standard part modelling features with sheet metal features to create a more diverse range of sheet metal shapes, including conics and square to round parts. The document can be downloaded here. Many other documents can be found in the Technical Documents section of the Members area. iAssembly Scope function When working with iAssemblies the iAssembly table can soon grow quite large to make working with the assembly easier use the “Scope” and set it to member scope.
Whilst in Member scope, changes made to the assembly will only affect that row of the iAssembly table. Assembly constraints added only affect that version and also if you right click and delete a part it does not delete it from the assembly but instead “Excludes” it from that version of the table.
IDW Memory Saving Mode In an Inventor IDW you can enable Memory Saving mode to reduce the amount of memory required to produce views of your Inventor models. This can be useful if you are reaching the limit of available memory on your machine, however this memory saving is at the expense of performance in the IDW file. To enable Memory Saving mode
Drawing view creation and modification operations cannot be undone or reverted while the Memory Saving Mode option is enabled. Blank Dynamic Simulation Panel Bar If your Dynamic Simulation Panel Bar is blank you can restore it as follows:
Verify Inventor is running in 3GB Mode To verify that Inventor is running in extended 3GB memory mode: Click Help menu > About Autodesk Inventor. The first line should read Autodesk Inventor - 3GB. Replace Style If you have applied a particular style to a number of object defaults, or a text style to several places and you now want to change it, you can right click the current style and replace it with another.
Set a Fillet weld symbol as your default Welding Symbol in an IDW If you have a Plug weld as your default Welding Symbol you may have filtered your Welding Symbols, which caused the Plug weld to be your default instead of Fillet weld. If you would like to change it to a Fillet weld symbol follow the steps below:
Hardware Acceleration On a default installation of 2007 based
products, the hardware acceleration is turned off. To turn this
on and take advantage of AutoCAD certified hardware, go to tools
- options - system and click the performance settings button. In
here choose Manual Tune and place a tick in the box marked
'enable hardware acceleration'. Note - The certification is for 3d Users only. If you are only utilising the 2d functionality, you will get no benefit from the above steps. Setting a Primary attachment to an Item after the Item was created If you have created an Item without having any files attached to it and you would then like to attach a file to the Item and have it set as the Primary attachment perform the following steps:
Inability to check in or add files to the Vault You have installed Autodesk Data Management Server and Vault clients and used them successfully. However, after some time you are now no longer able to check out or add any new files to the Vault In Autodesk Inventor, you receive the following error: Error 0: Unspecified Error In Vault Explorer, you receive the following error message: A problem occurred while attempting to check-out file 'filename.ext' from the server. Would you like to continue checking out any remaining files? The server returned the following information: Unknown Server Error. However, you are able to login and perform a Get Latest Version of files without a problem. This issue occurs when the Vault database has reached the 2GB limit imposed by Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Edition (MSDE) or the 4GB limit of SQL Server 2005 Express edition. To correct this issue, you will need to immediately upgrade to a higher level of SQL server. Vault 5 and Productstream 5 support Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express. Previous versions of Vault and Productstream do not support any version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005. To confirm that the limit has been reached, you can use one of the following methods: Method 1 - Verify the size of the Vault database (MDF file) In Windows Explorer, navigate to the following directory: C:\Program files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL$AUTODESKVAULT\Data If you have moved the Vault databases, navigate to the folder where your databases are located. Check the file size on disk and make sure it is not close to 2 GB. Method 2 - Review server-side Vault logs In Windows Explorer, navigate to the Vault server computer and go the following directory: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Autodesk\VaultServer\FileStore Open the most recent vlog-YYYYMMDD.txt (where YYYYMMDD stands for the date when the log file was created) file in Notepad or another text editor. Check to see whether the file contains the following entry: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Could not allocate space for object 'FileIteration' in database 'Vault' because the 'PRIMARY' filegroup is full. AutoCAD Electrical crashes when you try to change display Colours A problem may occur if you try to change your display colours in the Options dialog box, and AutoCAD Electrical 2007 crashes with the following error message: FATAL ERROR: Unhandled e06d7363h Exception at 7c812a5bh This problem may occur if your video card drivers
are not fully compatible with the system video requirements for
AutoCAD Electrical 2007. 1. Right-click the command line. Click Options.
Downloads, Service Packs & Updates New Downloads, Service Packs & Updates released
this Month. Major service packs and fixes in bold. Inventor Inventor
Series/Professional 11 Inventor DWF Extension Edition Graphics Mechanical Desktop 2007 AutoCAD Mechanical AutoCAD Electrical AutoCAD AutoCAD LT Productstream Hotfix - Item is Locked by User when Saving Changes Made to an Item Miscellaneous DWF Viewer 2007 Autodesk DWF Viewer 2007 – Service Pack 1 (required for Internet Explorer 7 compatibility) Design Review 2007 Autodesk® Design Review 2007 – Service Pack 1 (required for Internet Explorer 7 compatibility) Space Controllers To add greater usability and compatibility to the entire product line, 3Dconnexion have released 3DxSoftware version 3.0. Version 3.0 of 3DxSoftware features a new Configuration Wizard and added support for Autodesk Design Reviewer, Autodesk DWF Viewer, and Google Earth 4.0.
Mark Rowley of Harry Major Machines and John Schnabel of Xyratex were picked out by our Inventor Prize Draw macro (last seen at the Inventor 11 technical conferences) to win the two space controllers. For those of you who might be interested in some more Atari nostalgia, including emulators and where you can still buy one of these look no further than http://2600adventures.atari.org/. |
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Published by Micro Concepts Ltd Copyright 2006 Micro Concepts Ltd. All rights reserved. This Newsletter is provided by Micro Concepts and may be used exclusively for informational purposes by the addressee only.
www.microconcepts.co.uk I 01223 716200 |
Christmas Support
Cover
SpaceExplorer
is the hands-down winner when it comes to mid-priced 3D
navigation devices for design professionals. SpaceExplorer can
be used by either hand comfortably and features an array of
easy-to-reach function keys labelled and pre-programmed with
commands from leading design applications. 
Last month 18 of you correctly identified the
original 'must have' games console, the Atari 2600 and that it was
released as far back as 1977.