I'm jumping in on this old thread with my personal CAD story comments. I've been using AutoCAD daily at my regular job for about 23 years. For about the last 10 years I have had a work laptop with AutoCAD, Inventor, Navisworks, etc. on it that I would use at home in the evenings when I wanted to design something. At home a sample of what I have used a 2D drafting program for are the following; Sawmill design, forged hinge layouts, shed design, 2x72 grinder design, jigs, book shelves, casting patterns, knife designs. About 3 months ago I got tired of lugging my laptop back and forth to work every day and decided to revive an old XP computer that had been sitting in the corner for a couple years. One of the first things I started looking for was an inexpensive CAD 2D program. I have tried a bunch but what I really wanted was something that used the same commands and drawing steps as my work AutoCAD program. I also wanted it to be able to open my old AutoCAD files and save to the .dwg format so I could open files at work if desired. While I could learn a new program I am really really familiar with AutoCAD and I kept on searching around in the other programs looking for the equivalent AutoCAD command and at times there wasn't one and different steps were required for a drawing step. Well I think I finally found what I was looking for this past weekend. I downloaded a free copy of progeCAD 2009 and it works like AutoCAD. One final test was to open a ProgeCAD 2009 drawing file using my work computer and it opened just fine. I plan to use it for personal projects and so the free version is fine. It is a 2D program and that is fine. Another good feature is that it does not overload my old Windows XP machine. Some of the programs that I tried and rejected are the following: TurboCAD LTE, LibreCAD, A9CAD, QCAD, DoubleCAD, DraftSight32.