I got him all setup using VirtualBox 6.0 on his Win10 machine with a Win7 VM in which he could run Civil3D 2009.Īll was fine until it came time to do his monthly reinstall of Win7. He absolutely loves it! No more dual booting or running 2 separate machines. So over the holiday I introduced my dad to the world of virtualization, and convinced him to give VirtualBox a go. But he recently had to get a new computer, and he was having issues switching around his Win10 and Win7 installations to different machines. This has all been well and good and has been working fine for my dad for a couple years now. Needless to say, my dad has gotten very good and very efficient at installing Windows 7! He says it takes about a hour to install on the HDD (he swears Civil 3D 2009 runs better on spinning disks than on SSD), and Windows updates take about 12 hours. Due to the way Civil 3D installs, the only way to trick AutoCAD into thinking its a new device every 30 days is to completely reinstall Windows 7. His ONLY option is to run the 30-day over.and over. There is no way to reactivate it or even buy a new one, according to Autodesk support and sales teams. To make matters worse, AutoCAD has completely cutoff support for Civil 3D 2009 and deactivated my dad's paid license. He has spoken at length with Autodesk about these issues.

The specific details here are not important what is important is that my dad must use Windows 7. Civil 3D 2009 can only be run on Windows 7, either due to AutoCAD 2009 restrictions or perhaps a conflict with my dad's AutoCAD 2020 license on Windows 10.

He has one particular client that exclusively uses AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009, and due to AutoCAD compatibility issues my dad is forced to also run Civil 3D 2009 in order to be able to work in the files. My dad it a civil engineer who works for his own one-man firm. Just skip to the end for the main question if you don't feel like reading.

I am going to try to explain this in as concise a manner as possible.

80072efe windows 7 2021