Networking Archicad / general network question.

[Arcadia]

I am one-man band office so don't have much need of a network (and very little experience in them) but I was thinking of buying a new laptop with enought grunt to run Archicad and VBE for when i have to travel or to take to clients home's. To get more use out of it though I wondered if I could network it with my PC and be able to use it as a rendering machine when I need to instead of having to wait and run renders overnight. The only thing is I only have one AC license and one USB key. Is it possible to run another instance of AC over a network from the laptop without putting the USB key into it?

[Karl Ottenstein]

Arcadia wrote:
I am one-man band office so don't have much need of a network (and very little experience in them) but I was thinking of buying a new laptop with enought grunt to run Archicad and VBE for when i have to travel or to take to clients home's. To get more use out of it though I wondered if I could network it with my PC and be able to use it as a rendering machine when I need to instead of having to wait and run renders overnight. The only thing is I only have one AC license and one USB key. Is it possible to run another instance of AC over a network from the laptop without putting the USB key into it?

No, a single license USB dongle lets you run on a single computer at a time. That one computer can have multiple instances of AC running at the same time, but you cannot open AC on another computer.

You can set up the WIBU software so that the single license dongle can be in one or the other computer, yet any computer on the network can start AC (but once one is running AC, the others will not be allowed to until all copies of AC on the first one are closed).

(With my 8 core machine, and Artlantis, I haven't had a need to farm work off to another machine. I have rendered some animations overnight, but renders happen fast enough and continuing to work in ArchiCAD/etc on other stuff has minimal impact. If I was using only AC, I could be letting one copy of AC render while working in another. So... I'd be tempted to suggest that you upgrade your desktop machine, and get a middle-range laptop for travel.)

Cheers,
Karl

[Arcadia]

Thanks karl. I guess I kind of suspected that might be the case. Upgrading my PC is certainly something I have considered. I'm not familiar with MAC stuff but an 8-core CPU sounds awesome. I might have to look at what is the equivalent to this is in a PC.