Paul Aubin wrote a nice post about his trials and tributes while installing Autodesk BDS 2013.  I thought I would follow his thoughts and post about my adventures.

First off I didn’t have the issues that Paul had while downloading, I set mine to download went to bed and it was on the Install screen when I woke up in the morning.  I cancelled out of this to go check about the folder naming Paul had described in his post and I didn’t have this issue.  My folder structure was this “BDS_ULT_2013_English_Win_x86x64”.  So no issue with the long version.  Although I do agree that it has both 62 and 32 bit versions here so the folder is large to say the least.  The downloaded and extracted .zip file ended up being  66GB on my hard drive.

By default for me when I started the install only Revit, AutoCAD and Navisworks Manage were checked for install.  I thought this was a bit unusual since they are pushing the Suites  you would think some of the other programs would be checked so users would have an icon on the desktop and try out something new. I also found it odd that AutoCAD Architecture and MEP installed 3 icons for each, Imperial, Metric and English Global.  I know I told it to install all of those options but do I seriously need an icon for each.

I did notice that all of the products from the Media side of Autodesk all had updates (service Packs) available for them, including: SketchBook Designer, Showcase, 3DS Max Design.  I do like this about the installations of late.  I remember back in 2009 when the disks that were delivered were out of date because they had released a service pack for Revit during the shipping.

Infrastructure Modeler shouldn’t even have any configurations because all you can do is change a path, which is in the options later.  I did install this program although I don’t foresee being able to try it out for a while.

I started the deployment and it took me 20 minutes just to go through the configurations  and download the service packs for the media software.  I then took 2 hours to run the installation, not bad considering everything it was installing.  I didn’t have any issues with anything failing so for me it went all smooth. 

All I can say is sorry Paul my experience wasn’t as bad as yours.