Anybody familiar with multiple packages?
I've used Eagle PCB and am fairly happy with it. The freeware version is very limited in maximum board size though. But I hear a lot of people mentioning Protel and I got the impression it's more popular.
I used Protel a long time ago, the one I had was unstable and I learned to hate it. Part of that might be that I was using the auto-placement feature and it made such poor decisions that being random would have created something easier for the autorouter to handle. Then the demo ran out on it and I dropped it, they made it so you can't just reinstall the demo either. So I'm not sure I used it long enough to fully understand it.
I've seen Protel99 mentioned a lot more than Protel2004. Is 2004 not just an updated version of 99? Is it somehow not as useful? Or- let me guess- they upgraded security since then so hacked versions of later models aren't available?