
Then review all the foreign (as in – who-the-heck is this) sites your PC goes to without your knowing it.Īnd after a lot of experience with less-than-flattering blog posts on Autodesk web sites, I’m sure this one won’t get posted, or will simply disappear shortly.When you open AutoCAD layout, do you ever found your dimensions (or other annotation objects) are missing in some viewports? I saw many threads about this issue like this one in AutoCAD forum. If you really want to see just how much traffic goes OUT your Internet connection, and to where, install the free version of ZoneAlarm and let it learn for a while. Windows and the Internet has become nothing more than a marketing tool for vendors, and as Microsoft says, they “enhance the user experience”. And don’t get me wrong here…I love Google, but I don’t tollerate tracking. Nearly all toolbar apps for Web browsers are tracking tools. This is also true for most other free-bees you get like Google Desktop, the various Web toolbars from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, Comcast, Verizon. With it, Autodesk knows when your copy of AutoCAD is running, your local and public IP, machine name, license info, basically everything. The answer to the question “Still don’t understand why InfoCenter is forced on users” is:ĪutoCAD’s Info Center is a site/user tracking tool, pawned off as a “feature”. This type of inter-process communication channel is notoriously unreliable, and it’s not unusual to see the background task orphaned in memory after AutoCAD closes in an unusual way, sometimes consuming a lot of CPU cycles and sometimes preventing an AutoCAD restart until it is forcibly ended.

This feature of AutoCAD actually starts an invisible background task that runs as a separate process (named either WSCommCntr1.exe or WSCommCntr2.exe), which establishes inter-process communication with the running AutoCAD. Why would you want to disable the InfoCenter? Faster startup, for one. Packaging the custom action into an MSI is just a convenient way to ensure that you can uninstall in the future from Windows Control Panel even long after the MSI is lost or forgotten. No actual files are installed, as all changes are made in the registry.

The AcadInfoCenterOff.msi file on the ManuSoft Freebies page contains a custom action that disables InfoCenter during installation. Uninstall restores all previous settings. To make things simple, I decided to roll them all up into a single one-size-fits-all MSI file that disables InfoCenter for any and all versions of AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT in one fell swoop. The instructions are different depending on the AutoCAD version. Over the years, I and others have provided instructions for turning off the AutoCAD InfoCenter (or Communication Center in older versions).
