Windows 10 & Solidworks 2015-16 Student Edition – compatible?

[Chris Hapstack]

Although SolidWorks graciously provides student edition licenses to any FRC team who wants them, these licenses don’t come with technical support (certainly understandable, as technical support for thousands of students would be expensive). Because of this, I’m having a hard time finding out whether SolidWorks Education/Student 2015-16 will run on Windows 10. I know that SolidWorks Professional will run on Windows 10 if you install Service Pack 5 (we’re contemplating upgrading to Windows 10 at work). Is this update available for the student edition? If so, how can I get it? A couple of the computers my team uses are about to be updated to Windows 10 and I’m concerned that SW won’t run on them.

I searched through the SW student forums and turned up a few unanswered questions along these lines, so that route doesn’t look promising. I’ve also tried calling normal SolidWorks technical support, but they referred me to the forums as soon as they heard “student.”

If SW on Windows 10 is a complete no-go, is there any way to boot an old version of Windows on the same computer that’s running 10? I’m not super well informed on this front, but I know you can boot Windows on a Mac in order to run SolidWorks.

Any help is appreciated!