Quote:
Originally Posted by sanddrag
A year ago when I had a set of very old computers I needed CAD on, I investigated ProE and started going through their self-study certification training. I found certain tasks which are natural and very simple in SolidWorks or Inventor to just be atrocious in ProE, and quickly gave it up. I found its interface and work-flow to be rather archaic.
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Interestingly, Pro/E has an even more archaic interface mode: the menu manager (vestiges of which were still in WF5.0). It was actually quite efficient, once you knew where to find the options. Failing that, it was rather frustrating.
The current icon-based tabs are decent as well, but do take some getting used to—though no more so than Solidworks' custom ribbon, I would imagine. Either way, the Pro/E workflow is very good at enforcing robust geometric definitions, but tends to be much less helpful when you want to leave things undefined.
And at least in my experience, Pro/E can run on ridiculously underpowered hardware. In 2003, the first computer I installed it (Pro/E 2001) on was a Pentium II running at 450 MHz with 384 MB of RAM and an ATI Rage Pro. It worked great. I've had no trouble running Pro/E WF3.0 on a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz with a Radeon 9600 or an HD 3650. No such luck with Inventor; no version of that software has worked acceptably well on that computer. (I ran SolidWorks on a comparable computer with a FireGL; it was fine.)