Claris CAD translation to PC?

Question

My dad is an engineer, and he's been hanging onto our ancient Mac for the past ten years because he cannot access his old (crucial) Claris CAD drawings on any other machine. I'm trying to boost him into the 21st century. Is there any way to move these files and access them on a modern PC?

I'm no computer whiz, but from reading message boards, it seems like I might be able to do the following: find a program that would convert Claris files on the old Mac into .dxf or .dwg format, move the files to PC, and use a program like VectorWorks to open them.

Am I on the right track? Any suggestions at all?

Answer 1

I'm no wiz when it comes to using a Mac, but it sounds like you're going in the right direction. Try to have the file converted as a .dwg file (see if you can save it that way on a disk), and then once transferred a PC via removable disk (USB flash drives are great), try it with a CAD program. If you don't have a CAD program on the PC, you can try Google Sketchup, which you can download for free if you go to www.sketchup.google.com. Once you're in sketchup, go to FILE, then IMPORT. From there, you can open any .dwg file into sketchup, so you can at least see it. If it's multi-colored, it'll just show in black lines. It's not a CAD program, so you can't edit your 2D or 3D work and open it that way in CAD, but you can make 2D or 3D models from them once you play with it and learn how (there are basic tutorials to get started). But as long as you can get the file converted to a .dwg file, then you should be able to open it in either AutoCAD or Sketchup. Hope this helps.

Answer 2

That should be plenty of speed and power for CAD. As long as you're not working with a program that takes up a lot of RAM, like CATIA or something, you should be fine. AutoCAD will definitely work well with 2GB of RAM.

Answer 3

fweg