SolidWorks:HEARD!

When SolidWorks 2010 was in Beta, the release notes stated under "Technical Alerts" that support for parallel installations of service packs within a major release would be discontinued beginning with SolidWorks 2010 (ie. 2010 SP0 & SP1 in parallel on the same system). This decision was made in order to "reduce service pack size and download time" according to Release Notes and I am sure I was not alone when I thought this sounded like another potential promise that was going to be hard to deliver on. A similar statement was made back when SolidWorks switched from InstallShield to Windows Installer and touted the capability to "Rollback" a service pack.

2010 SP1 came out in early December and upon going through the usual screens in the SolidWorks Installation Manager (SWIM), the service pack payload showed a respectable 230MB for patching SolidWorks 2010 Premium with all the Simulation packages! This was approximately 1/5th the size of the equivalent SP1 patch for SolidWorks 2009 which was nearly 2GB. A few days ago, SolidWorks pushed out SP2 for 2010 and the service pack "diet" continued yielding only 200MB!

Reducing the download size of these service packs has made patching the install take less time and something that I can actually do during work hours again. When the patches were more than 1GB, I would begin the download at the end of the day to spare the bandwidth and hope that nothing happened when I returned in the morning. This made the entire patch process more painful and something I knew would take a chunk of time to complete. Out of all the hundreds of enhancements SolidWorks 2010 has brought, this is the one I know I will continue to enjoy for the remainder of this release! ~Lou