[writchie]

Although Inventor works fine in XP the hardware makes a big difference.

We find 2009 to be several times slower than 2008, at least on our school machines which have motherboard graphics and only 1 GB. We are finding these machines to be too slow to even smoothly rotate a sparse robot model.

Our team laptop that ran fine with 2008 last year struggles with 2009.

On a Dual Core 3Gb machine with high end graphics and dual 1600x1200 monitors it is slower than 2008 but still performs pretty well. It seems to take advantage of both cores. On all machines, inventor 2009 seems to have a habit of taking a lunch break for a minute or so, especially on measurements. We have also seen more than one BSOD so backup frequently.

I would highly recommend a desktop with at least 2GB of memory and a reasonable graphics card. On laptops, the same applies but it much better if there is onboard nVidia or ATI graphics. The Intel chipset graphics have pathetic performance.