As the local cad geek for our company; I've been considering the pros & cons of upgrading from SW2010 to SW2011. After following several threads on the forum here, I've come to the conclusion that most of the 18 or so workstations in our facility are not adequate to run SW2011.

From what I've been reading, it seems that the system requirements (real world, not minimum) need to have 6-8 gigs of ram and preferably a 64 bit OS. Only 3 of our 18 workstations are even close to that. So, my current recommendation for our company is to not upgrade until the hardware can also be upgraded. It seems the software has left (or is leaving) our hardware behind. Unfortunately, we don't have a hardware upgrade plan in place here for our cad workstations; so, we are for the time being, stuck with Windows XP 32 bit stations with 2 gigs of ram.

I say all this because I'm now wondering the value of maintaining our subscriptions. The cost pretty steep; I won't mention the exact figure but it is in the thousands. So, what  we are getting for our money, if not upgrading to the current release, is tech support. Since we have been using SolidWorks since 2004, we really have very few tech issues that require our re-sellers help. It seems like a very high price to pay for tech support that we don't use. I know there are a lot of issues such as cost to upgrade down the road if the subscription gets canceled; and we could just bite the bullet and upgrade our hardware (not cheap either).

So, I'm just wondering if other companies are dealing similar issues? Comments?

Thanks,
Steve