How much time do you actually spend restoring a CAD environment on a new PC?

[VicoWang]

Whenever the topic of setting up a new CAD workstation comes up, the standard advice is almost always: "Just export your .arg profile, CUI, and system variables. It should take about an hour or two to set everything up."

 

But spending an hour or two per PC is exactly the IT nightmare I'm talking about. Plus, exporting a profile only transfers the registry pointers and UI layouts. You still have to physically move all your .lsp/.dll plugins, custom .shx fonts, and .ctb plot styles. You have to recreate the exact folder structures on the new local drive and pray the Support Paths map correctly.

 

I got so tired of this manual grind that I ended up building a solution for it. I developed VedaCAD—a cloud package manager that completely bypasses this archaic process. It just pulls your entire custom environment (physical files, aliases, and paths included) onto a new machine in a couple of minutes. No manual folder mapping required.

 

Curious how you guys are actually managing this across multiple office workstations. Are you writing custom deployment scripts to copy the physical files, keeping everything on a mapped network drive, or just suffering through the 1-2 hour manual setup every time someone gets a new PC?

[BIGAL]

As previously stated, used an install lisp, only a few minutes.

[VicoWang]

1 hour ago, BIGAL said:

As previously stated, used an install lisp, only a few minutes.

 

Fair point, BIGAL! A solid install.lsp is definitely the fastest traditional way to beat the manual grind.

 

I basically built VedaCAD to take that exact same concept into the cloud, so we don't even have to carry around the ZIP files or maintain the installation scripts anymore.