Expert: J. B. Borge - 5/16/2006

Question
We run AutoCAD 2000LT in our office. We use blocks of stock paper sizes at different scales with layers already put into them to create all of our drawings. These files are about 60-70 KB on average, but after we draw into the space and save them as a different file, the size explodes to 3.5-5.0 MB. The arctitecture office next door to us (which uses AutoCAD 2005) has files with five times the amount of drawing in them at sizes less than 1 MB. Our large files are really causing our system to run slowly. Can you offer any advice as to why this might be? Anything would be of help to us.

Answer
Scott,

This is typical on the older releases of Autocad. Just purge out any unreferenced layers, blocks, entities, etc. to minimize file size; capitalize use of xrefs & blocks; upgrade to Autocad. Additionally, in Autocad 2005, Autodesk introduced its own dwg compression with in its engine. So the dwg files are automatically zipped or compressed in realtime. Hope this helps, let me know.

Regards,
J. B. Borge