SolidWorks 2006 features a host of new capabilities to help designers and engineers bring better products more quickly to market, and to more easily transition from 2D to 3D design. The software includes more than 200 enhancements and innovations, including fundamentally new approaches that allow design engineers to analyze and validate designs as they work. Featured in SolidWorks 2006 are a multitude of improvements that simplify, accelerate, and integrate design engineering work, including an exponential increase in performance; new user productivity tools such as Smart Components; new features for consumer product, sheet metal, and machine designers, such as Mounting Bosses, Snap Hooks, and Vents; new mainstream design validation capabilities that put sophisticated analysis in the hands of designers; an easier migration from 2D to 3D design, such as 3D Drawing View and Design Checker, as well as enhancements to the DWG Series (Editor, Gateway, Viewer); and enhancements in SolidWorks Office Premium that empower design engineers across the entire spectrum of their activities. Based on an analysis of actual customer usage patterns, the company focused performance enhancements for the new software in two areas — overall system architecture and common operations — with gains in large assembly and drawing processing. On the architecture side, the software has been optimized so that its lightweight file structure allows for fast processing at all times in a wide range of commands such as mating, components insertion, interference detection, and section view. With SolidWorks 2006, users can continue to work in drawings without waiting for drawing views or system graphics to be recalculated, saving valuable design time. The second set of performance improvements makes the most common commands in SolidWorks software interactive and instantaneous, regardless of how big the assembly might become. Additionally, SolidWorks 2006 supports the recently released Windows XP Professional x64 Edition operating system with a soon-to-be-released service pack.