As for the stories about problems with Omega, they are probably all true, but that would be for the earlier releases. The latest release, 1.54, probably has about 98% of all bugs fixed.

I'm waiting for the smoke to clear before I install it.

Joe the "bad" thing with Gerber's upgrade to Omega is that it rewrites the dongle so making it impossible to run GA 6.? and Omega side by side, this was my beef...I too had Omega sitting here for over a month before I installed it and would have liked to have had the use of 6.0 for a 30-60 day period after say before it locked me out...to help with the learning curve.

I found Omega very frustrating in the begining...as with all changes...there is a learning curve...there is lots you would recognise and lots of new good things...plus a few things I would like to see retained from GA. But on the hole as I get more used to it I am enjoying it more. I would have not upgraded had it not been for buying a new Dell Precision Workstation here, that had Win 2000 Pro in it, and Gerbers lack of interest in supporting GA after Win 98, I personally think that's a cop out for the many who enjoy the speed with which we had come to use GA. That said in a few months I will probably be eating my words! I have the 1.54 edition with service pack, and have had no bug type problems, apart from colour pallettes, I wanted to use the Avery pallettes which show more black sqaures than clours where colours should be?? My other moan is that 10 years of jobs, that I imported are all different colours that what they where in GA.

One last thing that I liked in GA was that if you had say Maín copy, with an outline or shadow, if it was ungrouped and the smart edit removed, you could always mark the main copy group it and then mark everything making the main copy unmarked and the shadow marked and then press F6 to group that...it doesn't work like that anymore. Its small things like that that make you feel your taking longer to achieve the same goals....maybe Glenn or Diane can put me right there.

I guess eventually we all have to move with the times.

I too, have a Dell 620, with Win2k pro.

Are you running Omega in that machine? Any problems?

I still run 6.21 from a Dell P133.

I bought my Dell with a dual monitor card so I have a 21" design Trinitron as the main screen and a 19" next to it, I have all the gsp plot window open there, and am free to design on the main monitor, its fun like that...the only thing I have noticed is that you are restricted in composer to the one frame ....if you open another or multiple composer windows you can't move them out to the other monitor....you must pysically open a new Omega, and have each Omega on each monitor abit like opening several old GA's at one time.

The most dramatic difference from a “behind the scenes” standpoint is that it is based on 32-bit code. From the interface standpoint, it is starting to resemble other currently released object/illustration based programs.

I can understand and appreciate the cautious approach many have taken, but many of the past issues are issues no more, particularly with new systems or systems with updated components. Some of the remaining issues are few and far between and won’t be experienced by a high percentage of users. Learning curve is there and will always be there on most major upgrade no matter what software.

As Steve Nuttle pointed out already, networking the different versions is not an issue. At my previous place of employment, we had five stations on a peer-to-peer network based on Win98SE. One station was a dedicated OMEGA machine, three dedicated GA 6.2 stations, and the last one was a “floater” (could go either way). They interacted without fail between them. I will disclose that the EDGE and one plotter ran thru one of the GA stations while the router was attached to a different GA station. A second plotter was attached to the lone OMEGA station. This was all done at the initial release of OMEGA. If you understand and feel comfortable configuring computer networks, follow Gerber’s networking documentation and you shouldn’t have any problems.

Remembering to save OMEGA files back to 6.2 plt format is mandatory for GA to open them, while limiting the file name to eight characters eliminated the OS from modifying file names. (i.e. Business Card.plt becomes buscar~1.plt)

As for a new USB OMEGA dongle being able to run GA; NO! If, and that’s a big if, you want to go back to GA, your supplier would have to become involved and may or may not be able to satisfy your request. There is a way of taking an upgraded parallel security block back to GA, but I don’t know if Gerber still supports that and desires for that method to be publicly mentioned.

You state that you currently have select and do only vinyl cutting. I’m a fan of Gerber’s, but IMHO, you may be better served by looking at other software packages offered. If you had an EDGE or set files up for EDGE production, I wouldn’t offer the same opinion.