MrMeldrum.co.uk

Last year I wrote a post describing how to get your hands on the free student copy of Autodesk software that you are entitled to for being in full time education. A few things have changed so I thought I’d up date it:

The nice folks at software company Autodesk have kindly set up a great area on their website where people involved in education can download their software for free. We use both Inventor and AutoCad in school but you may also like to try the other software available - I’d love to hear how you get on, in particular with SketchBook. To get your free software all you need is:

* A pc or laptop Click here for system requirements
* A broadband connection
* A School e-mail address (either a pupil or teacher e-mail address will do)

First go to the registration page for Autodesk’s Student community. When the page opens you will need to complete all of the required fields.

Important: At this stage you will need to enter your school e-mail address and also create a username and password. You should also enter an e-mail address in the ‘preferred e-mail’ field that you can access from home. All future correspondence will be forwarded to both addresses, using both means you can download the software at home.

Autodesk will now send you a verification e-mail. All you need to do is open the e-mail and click on the link to verify your account.

Now go to the Autodesk Student Community homepage and use your new login details to access the student community.

Once you have successfully logged in go to the software downloads tab and choose Autodesk Inventor Professional. You can select the correct version for your system from the drop down menu, then hit the download button. Just to help you pick which version: We have 2008 installed at school (no longer available for download), but I have used both 2009 and 2010 successfully.

There are a few download options but I would strongly recommend that you choose to DOWNLOAD USING THE AUTODESK STUDENT COMMUNITY DOWNLOADER. You will now be faced with a dialog box, select ’save file’ make sure you save it to a location on your PC where you can easily find it.

Once the download tool has been saved on your PC you are now ready to install it. It should only take a few minutes to install, once installed open it up and log in.
Finally, reselect the program you want to download and the download will begin. The download tool will also display your serial number at this stage. Make sure you record it so that you can insert it at the required stage of installation.

The files to download are quite large but it will happily run if you leave it overnight - just remember to make sure your PC won’t go into hibernation.

Once it has downloaded simply follow the on screen installation instructions, there are a few important things to note though:

During the configuration stage of installation make sure you change the units from inches to mm and choose ISO for the default setup.

If you are having any problems with this process then please feel free to leave a comment, or drop me an email.

I have to give credit to Robert Clements for this post, he wrote it originally in 2008, but I’ve made a few changes and posted it here because it’s pretty useful.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.