Are you an "old" N4W user?

[ThomasH]

Hi all

It has now been about a year since UGS pulled Femap from MSC.Software and with that effectively "killing" MSC.Nastran for Windows. I'm a a bit curious as to what happened since.

So for those who swapped to MSC.FEA as MSC.Software insisted:

Are you happy with the transition?

For how long had you been using Femap and how much time was required to get up to speed in Patran (or how much time do you think it will require)?

Is MSC.Patran/MSC.FEA "better" as MSC.Software insisted?

Has MSC kept their promisis that maintenance shoult remain the same?

If you were given the same choice today, would you still swap or has the overall experience been negative.

Also those of us who didn't swap, are you happy with your choices? Personally I'm very happy with Femap and NEiNastran and will go into more detail later.

First I just want to see if there is any interest in this discussion at all. Because to try to move an entire community from one software to another must result in experiences, god and bad.

Regards

Thomas

 

[tstanley]

Hi Thomas:

I made the switch to MSC-FEA last year. In general I was pretty happy. I've been using N4W since close to when MSC first offered it. I used PAL2 before that.

I found the ease of meshing, at least with tet 10 elements pretty easy. I've done just linear modeling over the years and gained the ability to do non-linear, although I haven't used it yet. It didn't seem to be as clunky as I expected for just run of the mill stuff. So in my case it was certainly more powerful for ordinary stuff.

On the other hand, I'm interested in working with composites, and without having Laminate Modeler, it isn't as nice. I've been struggling with this feature. Reading of the results is done using one of the utilities that they provide that has been developed by customers. The down side of this is that it isn't supported and the documentation isn't good, at least what I could find.

Regarding the maintenance, it did stay the same for the first year, but only for the first year.

I read your posts last year when you were deciding what to do. I suspect that NEiNastran may have had a deal something like UGS, or maybe not quite as easy, although I never asked.

If I had it to do over again, I think I would have asked NEiNastran because of their composite abilities. I did feel a certain loyalty to MSC because I'd been with them so long and they had treated me well over the years.

As you are, I'm interested to hear others experience.

Tom Stanley

 

[tstanley]

Does the lack of response mean that everyone is happy with their decisions, or were there very few customers for Nastran for Windows?

Tom Stanley

 

[SWComposites]

Maybe it is that very few people changed from N4W to MSC.PATRAN/MSC.FEA. I switched to FEMAP/NEiNastran due to better support and lower cost, and not having to learn another preprocessor.

 

[ThomasH]

If "everybody" changed from N4W to Femap/NEiNastran I would still be interrested in their opinions. My question could have been:

N4W and then what ? ;-).

Regards

Thomas

 

[johnhors]

I suspect that the majority of N4W users will continue to use N4W for as long as their licence keys permit, or until they migrate to another PC.

 

[ThomasH]

I think that MSC offered a "permanent keys" option so that means for a long time.

Still, I'm interested in how the users handled the "death" of N4W but if there is not interest in that discussion I won't insist.

Thomas