AvoyeDesign

If you will always be able to access WIFI, I would suggest buying a low end laptop and using an app like AnyDesk to remote access your office workstation.  I do this a couple times a week and it works very well.  You could save up to $1,000 on your laptop that you could spend elsewhere.  However if you need to do significant work in Chief where you don't have internet access this would not be a good option.

If you upload your plan one of us could look at it for you.  It is difficult to determine from a screen shot what is going on here.  Be sure that the file is not open in Chief when you upload or it will be blank when we get it.

I use a fairly low end laptop for my work.  It is an i3 with integrated graphics and a standard HDD, not even a faster SSD.  When I work outisde my home office I am at a coffee shop or co-working space with internet access, and I use an app called AnyDesk to remote access my home office PC.  I run Chief remotely on the home office PC, and it does all the heavy lifting (see specs in my signature.)  I am able to spend half as much on a laptop this way, and it works just fine.  If you are going to be in range of wifi access anywhere you plan to work, this may be an option for you.  However, if you plan to do work out of range of wifi then you might want a powerful laptop.

I use a 1060 card in my PC, but have no experience with a laptop card.  My PC card has 6GB ram and has never been a bottleneck to my system.  I would imagine the laptop might run a little hot with that card, so I'm not sure if thermal throttling will be an issue for you.

You should be able to find the installation of X8 on the old drive that is hooked up to your new PC.  Open Chief from that location and deactivate that license.

Yeah, I would doubt that there is an autosave of your file if you never did a "save as" and named it.  As others mentioned, it is the first thing you should do when starting a plan.  I've learned this the hard way too.

If you ever make this mistake again, my suggestion would be to start the 1st floor by copying the exterior walls from the 2nd floor, as well as any important walls such as those around stairs.  This will give you all your walls perfectly aligned, and you can change their properties after.

A couple of thoughts:

To expand on David's 1st comment, don't expect Home Designer Pro to create blueprints for you either.  And for that matter, spending money on Chief Premier won't do that.  You have to do that yourself, and it comes with a lot of experience to know what to put on blueprints and how to do that with Chief.  You may be paying a lot of money for Chief only to find yourself trudging through a program you don't understand, that is developed for professional users like us that work wtihn it every day.  It might be better for you to spend your money on hiring a designer to work with you on the plans.

As an HD Pro user, you should ALSO post your questions on the HD Pro user forum, as people there will be a little more experienced with the limitations of HD Pro and ways to work with those limitations.  A lot of advice given here will be helpful too, but some of it may not take into account such limitations and you may end up wasting time trying to figure out how to do what we suggest.

I'm coming from a position where to work on a commercial project without being the employee of an architect would be breaking the law, and an architect stamping my design would be breaking the law too.  Your laws may vary, but get to know them.  But I think the OP's question is much to broad to be answered by anything short of some good solid education of any sort, or at the very least gaining experience with someone local who knows this stuff.

You might want to start by searching Architecture schools in your area...

Hi Gene, I had a quick look at your plan for you and marked up some areas of concern.  Give that a go and see if it solves your issues.

Sushko Mirror Lake Drive Markups.plan

Can you describe the issues you are having?  You don't really give us much to go on here.  That system looks like it can handle quite a bit.  The CPU generally handles more work rendering 3D views that use vector view, while the GPU handles more work in standard view.  I'm not sure how other views are run, like physically based rendering.  However at 6 cores and 12 threads, I don't see that being a bottleneck, even at a slower 2.2 GHz base clock.

I would check to see that you have the latest video card drivers installed, and if you do, try uninstalling and reinstalling them.  Other than that I'll need more detail from you.

Also check that you haven't plugged your monitor into the outputs on your Motherboard i/o panel, but used the i/o on your 1080.  Theoretically, installing a graphics card should disable the on board graphics, but if you plug into the i/o on the motherboard and you get a signal to your monitors, your 1080 isn't being used for that, and your bios has likely identified where the monitor was plugged in and enabled the integrated graphics.

This is why buying bleeding edge technology is so risky.  My 1060 works just fine, and has never bottlenecked my productivity or shown signs of instability.  And 1080 cards have seen a significant price drop over the last few months.  Not to mention the new groundbreaking features of the 20xx cards don't habe much support from software developers.  I've watched a few reviews on youtube that suggest the release of this card was really rushed.

11 hours ago, Doug_N said:

Use a Leica DISTO S910 and you will never have to climb a ladder again. Well almost never.  You will need the whole kit with the special tripod as well.

You mean to say it will clean my gutters for me? 

10 hours ago, JJohnson said:

 

I also pin my programs to the taskbar.  That way you can right click on them and, with many programs, see a list of 12 recent files and pick the one

to open with.

 

This works with MS Word, Excel, and Notepad,Adobe Reader, and Paintshop as well as CA.

 

This is a real time saver for me.

 

 

I never knew that feature.  I'll be using it a lot now, thanks.

I use a 32" as my primary and have never felt the need to hide it.  I'd actually much rather it be visible because I am always switching windows, and opening a lot of pinned programs.  There are many more benefits to a larger monitor.

There is also a setting to lock the taskbar location, so you don't end up grabbing it unintentionally and dragging it around.

When doing as built drawings for a reno, I don't go overboard on being detailed and precise.  I do my best work on the building perimeter, floor heights, room sizes, window and door sizes and spacing, etc.  But like Michael said I use elevation pictures scaled to a known dimension to determine a lot of the unreachable parts.  I will need to charge a lot more money to buy a truck and drive it to a client's home with ladders and laser measuring tools to document the entire building to a T.

The interesting part is that most builders have a truck, a few ladders, and laser levels and a number of measuring tools, not to mention someone to hold the dumb end of the tape.  My drawings specify that the builder is to verify all dimensions of overhangs, eaves, roof pitch and heel height, among other critical dimensions around the building, to ensure the dimensions match within tolerances.  He communicates this to the truss designer, but if the tolerances aren't acceptable he will report the actual dimensions to me and I will update the plans.  Sometimes this calls for a small change order, but very rarely.

I specify my header as a 2x6 in plank orientation, which basically becomes the top of the RO and the casing nailer.  I then use x boxes and polylines in cross sections to show the header flush under the top plate and cripples down to the framing.  I very rarely do wall framing plans, so I just do what is needed to get the plans through the engineer.

Chief's door/window header options are atrocious at best.  I've never seen a real world condition as they build it, at least not to modern building codes.  The frustrating part is that they did a lot of work on how opening headers are displayed in plan and how their labels are named, but this is of little use if the framing is amateur at best.

One can only hope one day they learn to put the horse before the cart...

11 hours ago, lbuttery said:

HD PRO users can benefit from following the Chieftalk forum since PRO has many of the manual tools that Premier has

 

Lew

That being said, users here may not know of the limitations of the PRO version and give advice that doesn't work for the OP.  It would be a good idea for him to post on the HD PRO forum as well.

And now for the song that I hear in my head every time I go to this thread:

5 minutes ago, Kbird1 said:

Ahhhh.... I did post a while back in the Tips Forum that Ram Drives makes CA do weird things , including not Update Correctly..... I also had issues with Windows Update assigning my temp Folder to the Ram Disk.

 

https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/topic/17662-why-does-ca-get-slower-and-slower-the-more-i-use-it-solved/?page=2&tab=comments#comment-162092

 

*** ahhh I see you found that thread......

M.

Yeah, I was on that thread a while back, singing praises of the ram drive.  Figured I'd pop back in and link this thread.  I also linked it on the other post where the guy was networking his office and had this issue.

I'm linking a thread where I had a similar problem on most of my textures.  Turns out the issue is that I was running my undo and temp folders on a ram drive for increased speed reading and writing undo files.  Chief does say in the user manual that changing the data paths in preferences>general>folders can cause performance issues.  If your network setup involved changing any of these data paths, then this may be your problem.

3 minutes ago, Chopsaw said:

Wow, that is interesting.  Keep us posted if that is not the complete solution.

16 passes, 5 1/2 minutes.  My bump maps are kinda crazy but I'm just messing around.

I just wanted to link here to another thread where I discovered that using a RAM drive for my undo and temp folders was messing up my textures in Raytracing.

I was using ImDisk, but I'm not sure if this issue is specific to that utility or if it is how chief behaves on all ramdisk setups.  In order to raytrace with textures I just had to shut off the ramdisc, allow chief to assign temp and undo folders back to default, and voila!

....

Its... my RAM drive.

I shut it off, chief assigned the undo folders back to default, I get textures again.

Go figure.

Well, now I know if I need to RT I just close my RAM drive.