Cimex Software and Microsoft Vista

CimPACK / CimCAD & Windows Vista Compatibility

 As many of you have heard, Microsoft released their new operating system earlier this year. In the past it has been referred to as Longhorn, but now we all know it as Vista. Although one hears many negatives about the hardware requirements and the missing drivers, I must admit the demos at the CES show in January were impressive.

The previously released version of our software is 11.2, which we began shipping in late June 2006, over seven months before Vista was even out. As such, 11.2 was not tested on Vista, and is not a Vista compatible product.

Many software companies have warnings on their web sites telling users about the “perils” of upgrading to Vista. Just to give you one simple example, the online help system we use in all our Windows versions, as many other software vendors also use, is not compatible with Vista. Microsoft has not only removed that functionality, but expressly forbidden third party vendors from sending out the simple programs that would allow compatibility with that help method, nice guys.

Our latest version of CimPACK / CimCAD is version 12.0. We had to make a file format change to achieve some of the added functionality we needed. This will be our first Vista compatible version. We have Vista here at Cimex and are testing version 12.0 on it and making changes as needed.

It may be that your current version of CimPACK / CimCAD will work on Vista, certainly everything won’t work though and if you run into an issue unfortunately there won’t be much we can do about it. As such we would recommend that you abstain from Vista for your CAD needs or upgrade to version 12.0. For forwards compatibility 12.0 will only run on a new USB activator that we are in the process of switching to, not on parallel keys.

Thanks, and we hope all is well with you and your businesses.

All of us at Cimex