Can I run plain AutoCAD® even if I installed AutoCAD Mechanical?

This seems to be a question that comes up quite often when talking to different manufacturing companies. Of course the answer is yes. Once given that answer, there is almost an immediate second question of,

How?
After installation of AutoCAD Mechanical, an icon gets placed on your desktop for AutoCAD Mechanical. Not one for AutoCAD. The icon to start AutoCAD is hidden in the program group in your start menu. You will have to click the Start Menu button > Programs > Autodesk > AutoCAD Mechanical. In there you will find the icon for AutoCAD.

At this point you have a number of different options. You could just select it from here and AutoCAD will launch. This is a great solution for when you only occasionally want to run AutoCAD. If you are regularly going to run AutoCAD you will want to put it onto the desktop. The next set of steps will walk you through one way of creating a desktop icon.

Creating an AutoCAD desktop icon.

An easy way to create the desktop icon for AutoCAD is to reuse what is already there for you. If you were to go to the icon in the start menu group and right click on it you have many options. One of those options is to “Send to”. That is a sub menu that will give you many options. The quickest and easiest option to use would be, “Desktop (create shortcut)”.

Once that option is selected a desktop icon will be created for you to use at your convenience to start up basic AutoCAD instead of using AutoCAD Mechanical.
At this point you have an icon that will startup AutoCAD with the basic setup from its installation.

Congratulations on setting up an Icon for starting basic AutoCAD!

Then there is always another question of:

What about my company’s settings?

If you, or your company, had previously created a profile with your specific settings you can create a new icon that will launch that profile.

In order to start AutoCAD with the profile you want, you will need to modify the AutoCAD icon. On your desktop right click the AutoCAD icon. In the menu that appears, choose the properties option at the bottom of the choices. In the Target field you will need to add the path and profile name that you want to run at launch of AutoCAD.

Example: “C:\Program Files\Autodesk\ACADM 2010\acad.exe” /p “C:\CAD Setup\custom.arg”

Save your settings by pressing the “OK” button. Launch AutoCAD with this new icon. Now you should have a session of AutoCAD with your settings in plain AutoCAD. Enjoy!