Salaam again Payam (notice how subtly I picked up on having misspelled salaam before).

Up until I bought Protel I was still using one of those $30 programs you can buy from a display rack at the local electronics parts house. I did all of my own routing by hand and would still be doing so but for one thing. I was trying to scale down a board and found that my cheap little program started getting buggy below 10 mil (that's 0.010" or 254 µm for you metric types) spaces, and at 6 or 7 mil spaces it couldn't tell that the traces weren't shorting out. Consequently I couldn't get a good ERC (Electrical Rules Check) or DRC (Design Rules Check) report. I had no choice but to upgrade.

I found the best deal on my Protel 99SE. It was an US$8000 package that I got for US$2000. If I had gotten a better deal on OrCad or PADs I wouldn't have bought the Protel. As for having a favorite, I think the best package is the one that makes the most efficient use of your time. And that is usually going to be the one you're most familiar with. I don't doubt that Protel has idiosyncracies, but so do all the others. If you went out and spent US$90,000 (that's right, ninty thousand dollars) on Mentor Graphics' top line suite, you'd still have idiosyncracies to deal with. Sometimes you will find a program (like the cheap one I used to use) with a real problem, but usually it's just a matter of trading one way of doing things for another.

Now would I go back to using DOS based OrCad? No, not even if it did have a better autorouter than the old one I used back when. The parts editor alone would stop me from going back, not to mention the fully integrated development environment. Moreover, my Protel 99SE will route a board in 30 seconds that would take the old autorouters 30 minutes (on comparable machines). No, I think I'll stick with what I have. Thanks anyway.

Now about your OT comment. I'm afraid you've stumped me. I don't know what a compact 243 is, but I'm guessing it's a car. If so, I have to tell you that moving out here to the ranch has changed quite a bit of things for me. I now drive a big Ford F150 Crew Cab (four door). A compact car would be of little use when pulling a livestock trailer full of cows, or hauling a half ton round bale of hay. Plus, the grocery store is 30 miles away, so when we go we usually buy a month's worth of groceries at a time. A small car, once again, would be found sorely wanting. But, back when I was still in Dallas I had a Porsche 944. And there is a road here, they call it the Lake Road, that winds through the woods alongside a lake between my ranch and town, and oh how I miss my Porsche when we drive that road.