What does everyone think about the recent price increase? (27%+ $7.2k->$9.2k)

[DerekG]

Today Altium 14 crashed 2x and generated an error report to send it to Altium.
No written handbook, obsolete video tutorials and very expensive training courses.
Well, makes me angry to pay so much money for it. Altium has to become much better.

Remember, Altium is ONLY tested on Intel based processors. No testing is done on AMD & Altium do not recommend any processor other than Intel.

Most crashes relate to the video card or from running out or RAM. Don't open too many complex boards at once & update your video drivers is always good advice. If the crashes keep occurring, change over your video card to another brand/model.

Also, do not use Windows Vista.

Remember as a minimum:

Motherboard RAM = 3GB
Video RAM = 1GB
Processor = Intel

I can't remember the last time I suffered a crash when using Altium.

[MrAureliusR]

I have an FX-8350 AMD processor, 8GB of RAM and a GT630 graphics card with 4gb of GDDR and it works smoothly. But I uninstalled it because I like DipTrace better

[DerekG]

But I uninstalled it (Altium) because I like DipTrace better.

Join the club. I still have some legacy designs in Altium & still do some design work in it, but essentially I too have left it behind for all but the most complex designs.

You could have left it on your machine. The PCAD export filter in DipTrace imports fine into Altium with the exception that some of the component overlay text moves around.

[Gunb]

Remember, Altium is ONLY tested on Intel based processors. No testing is done on AMD & Altium do not recommend any processor other than Intel.

Most crashes relate to the video card or from running out or RAM. Don't open too many complex boards at once & update your video drivers is always good advice. If the crashes keep occurring, change over your video card to another brand/model.

Also, do not use Windows Vista.

Remember as a minimum:

Motherboard RAM = 3GB
Video RAM = 1GB
Processor = Intel

I can't remember the last time I suffered a crash when using Altium.

LOL!

My machine:

Intel core i7-4770  CPU @ 3.40GHz
8GB RAM
Geforce GTX750 Ti, 2GB
Samsung SSD
Win7 - 64Bit


Don't start discussions about machine ressources, we've got several Altium licences on different powerful machines - they all have the same problems. And we're using Altium for years. It becomes worse from release to release. The update rate last month has revealed Altium's quality problems.

Cheap bugs, just that simple.


And: any software running only on Intel machines with such a high price is a bad software.

[DerekG]

Don't start discussions about machine ressources, we've got several Altium licences on different powerful machines - they all have the same problems. And we're using Altium for years. It becomes worse from release to release. The update rate last month has revealed Altium's quality problems.

Cheap bugs, just that simple.

And: any software running only on Intel machines with such a high price is a bad software.

Well, then it's time to see the light like I did. Don't keep bashing your head against the wall 

If your designs are not super complex, take a look at the latest release of DipTrace. It's great value & easy to learn, yet quite powerful.

If your designs are more complex, give a Proteus a try. A great UI & also pretty quick to learn.

Both will save you considerable $$ & there is no doubt you will live longer.

You can export your existing designs from AD so don't feel you're locked in.

There are plenty of alternatives out there & as I've said many times before, I do not like Altium the software & I more intensely dislike Altium the Company.

Take a deep breath & make a life changing decision that will reduce your future stress levels.

PS: With the money you save, take a well earned holiday .................... every year until you decide it's time to retire

[snoopy]

Don't start discussions about machine ressources, we've got several Altium licences on different powerful machines - they all have the same problems. And we're using Altium for years. It becomes worse from release to release. The update rate last month has revealed Altium's quality problems.

Cheap bugs, just that simple.

And: any software running only on Intel machines with such a high price is a bad software.

Well, then it's time to see the light like I did. Don't keep bashing your head against the wall 

If your designs are not super complex, take a look at the latest release of DipTrace. It's great value & easy to learn, yet quite powerful.

If your designs are more complex, give a Proteus a try. A great UI & also pretty quick to learn.

Both will save you considerable $$ & there is no doubt you will live longer.

You can export your existing designs from AD so don't feel you're locked in.

There are plenty of alternatives out there & as I've said many times before, I do not like Altium the software & I more intensely dislike Altium the Company.

Take a deep breath & make a life changing decision that will reduce your future stress levels.

PS: With the money you save, take a well earned holiday .................... every year until you decide it's time to retire

If people are already using Altium and they want a more reliable package minus some bells and whistles then they should consider going back to using Protel 99SE. I have used 99SE on basic windows XP machines up to my current machine which is a DELL i3770 running Windows 7 Professional and it always runs quick and reliably. For a 10 year old cad package it is still superior to a lot of current offerings today. Protel had their sh.t together when they released 99SE back in the hay day

I've been using Altium for the last month or so and gotten used to it. Altium is essentially a superset of 99SE but with the same commands enhanced or located in different menus. They have gone backwards on some features such as library management which is brain dead in Altium. For example if I want to edit a part on my schematic I can't just click on that part and it is automatically selected in the library dialog ready to be edited like it was in 99SE. I have to manually go search for it and then right click on it to edit it. Now that is brain dead  But you learn to get around these obscure features.

One of the benefits of Altium over simpler packages is its multi channel design although there are some quirks with it. For example all of the channel rooms have to be oriented in the same direction otherwise when you clone a room it screws the up the rooms that are pointing in the wrong direction 

cheers

[snoopy]

I just checked out the guided tour of Diptrace and it looks like they have improved it a lot since Dave reviewed it a few years ago.

http://diptrace.com/diptrace-software/guided-tour/

For the price it is pretty good value.

Isn't it funny how these cad vendors copy ideas from each other

[Scribe]

Seeing as we purchased it expecting Altium to constantly improve Vault as a new way forward, only to find that when they finally fixed it they decided to charge a fortune for even the most basic version... not very happy at all.

[free_electron]

What is all this crashing stuff ?  I use altium almost daily and very few if any crashes.
My machine is nothing special. Quad core i5-760, 4 gig ram, win7-32 bit and gt680 nvidia card.

But ! And here is the big but ! The machine is clean ... Nothing else gets installed.

I had a problem with the .15 altium update due to a botched microsoft update of net. 4.5. Not altiums fault ! Reinstalling .net 4.5 solved tha altium problem.

[Rufus]

What is all this crashing stuff ?

It doesn't much crash for me either but I know it does and has history of crashing for others.

But ! And here is the big but ! The machine is clean ... Nothing else gets installed.

Not likely to have much to do with it. Altium is a huge program with plenty of bugs (current version has several bugs in the variant system). Some of those bugs corrupt data in memory which ends up as a crash when the corrupt data fails bounds checks or causes an exception. The crash is remote from the bug which actually caused it so the crashes appear random and impossible to reliably reproduce. Crashing or not is more likely to do with what is on your board and how you manipulate it. If you don't use variants you won't see any of the current variant bugs, similarly if you don't much use arcs or differential routing or whatever you won't see crash causing bugs associated with those features.

[snoopy]

What is all this crashing stuff ?  I use altium almost daily and very few if any crashes.
My machine is nothing special. Quad core i5-760, 4 gig ram, win7-32 bit and gt680 nvidia card.

But ! And here is the big but ! The machine is clean ... Nothing else gets installed.

I had a problem with the .15 altium update due to a botched microsoft update of net. 4.5. Not altiums fault ! Reinstalling .net 4.5 solved tha altium problem.

I get the rare crash in advsch.dll but no big deal. I can still save my work and restart it again.

But I can get it to hang by resaving my pcb library back to 99SE format. It works ok for the schematic library but not for the pcb library so now I have had to create two separate pcb libraries when I wanted it to be common to both packages.

cheers