The Stroke of Doom

A few minutes ago, 12:26 AM, and my student AutoCAD program died for real. I was almost done doing up one last sketch elevation for my upstairs bathroom, when suddenly the command prompt froze and I couldn't get back to the layout to print it.

Fortunately, I had saved it to pdf in progress, but it's not as pretty as what I was working on.

Oddly, model space stayed with me for a few minutes more, and I got a screen shot of what I was doing.

Was going for a screenshot of something else I wanted to save, but I hit the zoom button the wrong way, and when I tried to zoom back in-- or was it out?-- everything in model space was gone.

. . . Just tried again. All the way out, all the way in. Nothing.

Well, with the pdfs and screenshot jpgs I've got my work in a form I can look at and hand-sketch over. But now that I've gotten used to this program, what are my options?

1. Buy the professional version, for $1,000 to $1,500 for the "lite" version; for up to $4,000 if I want all the 3D bells and whistles. Yeah, right.

2. Renew my student license, either through the tech school or a local retailer. That'd be a lot cheaper, but do I really want all my drawings to go on saying "PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK EDUCATIONAL PRODUCT" for the next fourteen months?

3. Find work with an architect who has AutoCAD 2008 and who'll let me install a licensed copy on my home PC-- for the convenience of the firm, of course. At the moment, something might be happening along those lines . . . sorta . . . but the architect in question is running AutoCAD 2007. And I don't think I can convert files backwards.

4. Wait a year or two until AutoCAD 2008 is considered out of date and the price goes down. I mean, I won't be redoing my bathroom before then. And I have the pdfs in the meantime, if I want to dream . . .