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I presently work with SolidWorks 2007 on an XP workstation with a 3.2 GHz Xeon processor and 2 GB RAM. I deal with some large assemblies and while I have noticed they cause some rendering hiccups graphically I have not yet run into memory overruns or similar issues.
Prior to SW06/07 I worked in Pro/Engineer 2001, Wildfire, and Wildfire 2.0. SolidWorks is *much* easier to learn and become proficient with than any Pro/E package. That said, I do have SolidWorks 2008 Vista 32bit at home and don't use it much. It's quite a bit different than 2007 which I have to use at work so I don't want to confuse myself. Another issue with Pro/E is it uses far more memory resources and has more issues with memory management causing more frequent overruns and crashes.
SolidWorks can typically save various file types or "universal" export files to use on different systems. As far as I have seen SketchUp doesn't handle this as well (maybe Pro does?). SolidWorks is a real solid modeling program and is very capable...I can strongly recommend it if you want to hone your skills as a mechanical designer (not sure how well it would work out for architectural/civil engineering folks though...not sure what's involved in that type of work but they all prefer AutoCAD).
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