I'm shopping for an inexpensive CAD system for a small startup doing microprocessor-based servo stuff. I need fine-line multilayer for the digital stuff, and copper pours and weird copper structures for analog work.
I asked a buddy about P-CAD (what he uses) and he reports these serious deficiencies:
You can't save some things in pcad till all of the errors are gone. It
> has been that way for a long time and the support people don't seem to
> have much of a clue.
> It is a real pain if you are making a large library part you can't
> stop and save and come back to it later. It also does not always tell
> you that the file you just tried to save was to a read only directory
> and it did not really do anything. It also trys to reconnect to all of
> the files you have used recently so you can't move them. same with
> printers, if you remove a printer it has used recently you may not be
> able to get it to run. or it will at least take quite a while to
> startup....I have seen on the order of more than 10 minutes.
This is of course unacceptable. I'm of the "save-early-save-often" school, because one can never predict acts of god that clobber one's work. I don't want to lose hours of work because of this kind of thing.