Show Idea: PSPICE

[scienceking]

PSPICE is an invaluable tool that all people from the Senior Project Engineers who made your motherboard down to DIYers making their first project use to help them design circuits before hand and simulate their behavior, so they don't have to burn their circuit boards up to work the kinks out a design. Best of all, its pretty easy to use, and for the student edition is free!
The student edition is the same software as the full package, it just has restrictions on the number of parts and how well you can customize the parameters of your parts(which can be a problem with transistors...).
This is really important to especially students and beginners, as it can help them explore concepts without expensive test equipment etc, and also have them explore why you DON'T want to do certain things, by seeing huge currents spike over devices etc.
http://www.electronics-lab.com/downl...013/index.html has it and pretty good instructions, but you'll see it will take some getting used to. There are tons of books and manuals and online guides to basic simulation using it.
The only annoying thing about PSPICE is that it uses some jargon for some simple things that would not clue people into what they do, like the idea of an AC Sweep or a "DC transient response" when these are really basic tests that we all probably know how to do just by watching SYSTM so far. So making a show around how to use it could probably help overcome some of these nasty difficulties.
The only other bad thing about it I can think of is that it won't work in CrossOver under OSX... It installs and then sorta works, but I can't place parts. This is for both the student and full version of OrCAD.