Re: Protel 99SE - a good choice

On Wed, 31 May 2006 11:04:21 -0700, Mike Rocket J Squirrel
<j.michael.elliott@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have been using Protel 3.x for ages (obviously), but under XP it
crashes a lot, for various reasons that are mysterious, despite my best
effort to make XP as compatible as possible. I don't do many boards, and
my needs are simple: schematic capture and board layout, mainly analog,
large-trace, two-sided, hand-placed and routed. About two boards a year.
That said, I have huge schematic and pcb libraries and don't want to
re-create all those bits.

But this week the crashing and other quirks of Protel 3.x have finally
gotten really frustrating, so I contacted my local Altium salesguy and
he quoted me nearly $10,000 to buy a single seat of Designer 6, which is
a bit silly for my needs. He agrees. He suggested that maybe 99SE would
be a better choice, and knows a fellow who is looking to sell his copy
for $3,000.

$3,000 is affordable, but it's not a trivial amount of money. I could
use a bit of advice on this before I plunk down the cash, so TIA who can
maybe provide some guidance.

99SE is reasonably decent. It is a good upgrade from 3.x. I tried
demos of later versions, and for my needs they add nothing worthwhile,
while eating up 10x more resources. Like many other Windows programs,
the programmers seem to be rewriting the application using Microsofts
latest buzzword technologies, making it slower without adding much.
Going from simple monochrome pictures to indicate which dimensions one
is changing for a pad to going to pictures with a shiny copper sheen,
which does not give any more info but takes much more processing power
to display.

Regards
Anton Erasmus

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