AutoCAD can also be used for PCB layout drawing and that sort of thing if that's what you plan on doing.
Are you going to buy this program? That's probably the deciding factor on which to choose The Orcad suite has easily one of the top 3 pro capture programs. Eagle is good (not great) if you're on a very small budget and don't mind designing your own parts, the trial sucks though IMO. Electronics workbench/Multisim stuff is great for novices and education and probably has trial versions. gEDA is free software but it's also harder to use and less full featured. (Good if only it had a better library and was simpler) Altium suite is bloated and purposefully complex while still being clunky. Old Protel suite (now owned by Altium) is quite good and pretty cheap and has a large fanbase. It looks like MS Office '97, but don't let it fool you. Capilano design works I haven't tried but I like another product of theirs a lot. Mentor's PADS is pretty hardcore pro stuff, capture with it is easy, PCB design is very much not. I spent 3-4 hours with it and eventually just gave up. ExpressSCH from ExpressPCB is crap, unless you want them to make you PCBs. Target 3001 is really buggy, it looks really good but for me it was practically unusable. Of all those, I liked Orcad capture the best, but I still found it bloated with shit I will never use. All anyone really needs are bitmap parts, a wire router and in some cases SPICE. Right now I don't have any of the programs installed because I'm looking for something very light weight (around 5mb). The Japanese bsch looks good in that respect: http://www.suigyodo.com/online/schsoft.htm Even Eagle can't touch it
Quartus for digital?! Give Capilano Logic Works a try, real time simulation, not just waveforms I also forgot Kicad, this is a very nice free suite which easily matches Eagle.
Sounds good, will give it a go. Only said quartus because they're a free web version and its what we use at uni
