I have closed the performance and productivity polls as described in my posts here and here, and the results can be seen in the Polls Archive. As with most of the other polls I’ve run here, the distribution of votes has not changed greatly after the first few days.
It is clear from the very different voting patterns in [...]

If you’re a major company and your various web-based services have evolved over time, you may have a proliferation of user IDs and some other issues to tidy up. You may be tempted to have a major overhaul.
If you think your reputation among your customers isn’t low enough and you desperately want this update to be [...]

It seems that most of you are convinced that AutoCAD is getting slower, but I’ll leave the poll going for a while longer. But even if AutoCAD is getting slower, does that mean that it’s actually less productive? Do the new features introduced in recent releases allow you to produce more useful work in a [...]

I see quite a few comments in various places that say that AutoCAD’s performance has been getting progressively worse by the year. Is this what most people think, or just the viewpoint of a few complainers? Let’s find out, shall we? I’ve added a poll that asks for your opinions. Feel free to comment, too.
Note [...]

I generally dislike blogs that just regurgitate contents from elsewhere, so I’m going against the grain here to repost something from Shaan Hurley’s Between the Lines blog.
Shaan has been a bit quiet over the past few weeks, but has recently made up for this with a vengeance. A flurry of new posts has pushed this [...]

If you’ve noticed some normal drafting operations are much slower in AutoCAD 2009 than in earlier releases, try turning off the new Layer Palette and see if the problem goes away. For example, editing viewports with the Layer Palette visible can be completely unworkable. Don’t just auto-hide it, close it altogether.
Another problem presented by the [...]

Testing performance under Vista can be an interesting experience. The trouble is, Vista tries to improve its performance by observing what you do and caching it for later use in case you do it again. This leads to something akin to the observer effect in science, where the very act of observing something has an [...]

One of the things I like least about AutoCAD 2009 (at least in Release Candidate form) is that I find it very “sticky”. That is, I find myself having to wait for an instant here, then again there, yet again over there. Most of my testing has been on a middle-aged Pentium 4 (3.0 GHz [...]

For many 3D users of AutoCAD, the ViewCube is likely to be the most useful new thing in AutoCAD 2009. There are a couple of problems with it, at least in the Release Candidate:

It does not work in 2D wireframe mode (which is, paradoxically, where 90% of my 3D work is done). You need to [...]

I’ve now tested startup times of various AutoCAD releases under Vista. Here are the results, alongside the XP results for ease of comparison:

Release
First
Startup
Subsequent
Startup

XP
Vista
XP
Vista

12
8.6
-
8.2
-

13
2.6
1.8
1.3
0.8

14
2.1
-
0.5
-

2002
3.2
2.1
0.6
1.1

2004
-
4.3
-
1.7

2005
-
7.9
-
4.5

2006
14.9
8.7
2.6
4.4

2007
13.8
11.9
3.5
6.6

2008
14.6
10.5
3.6
6.0

2009
28.9
17.3
7.2
13.3

Same caveats as before, plus the following:

Some AutoCAD releases were not installed on both XP and Vista partitions, hence the gaps in the table.
The Vista tests were performed on the same PC as [...]

This table shows both the initial and subsequent startup times for various releases. Most of the qualifications and caveats from my AutoCAD 2009 - The Prequel Part 6 - Initial Startup Time post still apply here.

Release
First
Startup
Subsequent
Startup

12
8.6
8.2

13
2.6
1.3

14
2.1
0.5

2002
3.2
0.6

2006
14.9
2.6

2007
13.8
3.5

2008
14.6
3.6

2009
28.9
7.2

AutoCAD 2009’s subsequent startups are much less slow than its agonising first startup, as to be expected. Windows XP is [...]

One thing you’ll notice (and dislike) right away with AutoCAD 2009 is that it takes a lot longer to get started. How much longer? About twice as long as recent releases, or about ten times longer than ancient speed demon Release 13. (I bet a 1994 AutoCAD user transported forward in time would be shocked [...]