Tomorrow evening I will be flying out to Anaheim to attend SolidWorks World 2010.  It has been two years since I last attended the event.  I am really excited to catch up with old friends and make some new friends in the SolidWorks user community.

It is going to be a very busy week.  Saturday I will be participating in a full day of usability and alpha testing.  Sunday I am lined up to attend a days worth of focus groups.  Hopefully, I will be able to offer some useful information to the folks at SolidWorks.

Sunday evening is packed with the SolidWorks User Group Leader Event that is being organized by Randy Lennox.  There is also the SolidWorks World 2010 Tweetup/Blogger Social.  I plan to make time to attend both events.

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We now have two work arounds to be able to install SolidWorks 2009 SP5 on your Windows 7 computer.

We have been able to install all previous SP’s of SolidWorks 2009 on our Windows 7 machines and for many of us it has been working very well.  For some reason SolidWorks has chosen to block the install with the SolidWorks 2009 SP5 Installation Manager.  I have written about my experience installing SW2009 SP5 here.

I was able to work around the issue by manually downloading and installing the individual components from the SolidWorks Customer Portal.

Jason Raak, of RockSolidPerspective.com, spent some time this morning upgrading his install of SolidWorks 2009 to SP5.  His solution was to run the Installation Manager in Windows Vista Compatibility Mode.

Read about Jason’s solution at his blog

Cheers,

Anna

Why has SolidWorks decided to not allow the installation of SolidWorks 2009 SP5 on Windows 7 computers when using the SolidWorks Installation Manager?

I have been happily running Solidworks 2009 on Windows 7 for most of the year.  But now the last service pack of SolidWorks 2009 will not be allowed to install.  SolidWorks 2009 SP4.1 runs great on my Windows 7 computer.

You mean, all of a sudden, SolidWorks 2009 is not capable of running on a Windows 7 machine and has to be blocked by the SolidWorks Installation Manager.

This is extremely disappointing and the kind of decision by SolidWorks that infuriates users.

EDIT: You can get SolidWorks 2009 SP5 to install on your Windows 7 machine.

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