It’s a shame when software is deliberatly crippled in such a way that paying users are unable to use it to its fullest potential. The only way I can get AutoCAD to run in a VM without deactivating itself on every boot is to ONLY run it in a dedicated VM. AutoCAD has a paranoid-schizophrenic activation system, which is hyper-annoying after you’ve paid more than $1000 to buy their software. Look for more like this in the future.ĪutoCAD LT 2008 works nicely in a boot camp partition under VMWare Fusion – that is, until you go back and boot directly into your boot camp partition, at which point AutoCAD will deactivate itself and you will have to go and get a new key. In the second demo (about 2:18 in), AutoCAD is running off a regular virtual machine (no physical partition required), which I bet the user really enjoys being able to do great things like suspend his virtual machine, and resume it in a snap, in addition to taking snapshots of his VM.Įither way, both demos are really neat.

The likely story is that the user was using Boot Camp to run AutoCAD by rebooting (yuck) before he got VMware Fusion. In the first demo, AutoCAD is running off a Boot Camp partition being managed by VMware Fusion. Without any further ado, here are those demos of AutoCAD on Mac with VMware Fusion. My little trip around the ‘Toob reminded me of this neat AutoCAD demo a user posted a while back.ĪutoCAD is another key app like Dragon Naturally Speaking that our users lament not existing on the Mac, and for which they use VMware Fusion to help them run on their great Mac hardware.

The last post led to a quick jaunt around YouTube looking for other demos that users had posted of Windows on Mac with VMware Fusion.

Autocad for mac student