NOT AGAIN!!!!!

[mike engles]

Hello

If you have a lot of little bitmaps,shadows,blends,contours etc, Xara has to do a lot of work to render them.
Saving such files can be really slow.
Ctrl Alt Deleting, does not always mean that you have a crash or that the application has stopped responding. It is just a dirty way of exiting.
Xara gives no indication that it is working.
On a slow computer or with little ram, all those effects take processing power, Xara is working.
You might find that if you leave it, it will complete the process it was working on.

Do an experiment. Open a few applications. Do a ctrl alt delete. Look at the application that is supposed to be not responding. Cancel. Make another application active. Do ctrl alt delete.
Windows nearly always says that the active application is not responding. It means nothing. It just confirms to you what you THINK you know.


I once asked Xarax to render a zoom of 500% on a fractal transparency of 3000dpi. Xara acted as if it was locked, no disk activity, nothing. I left it and it eventually completed the task.
Sometimes a task that might seem simple can actually really tax the whole system.
It would be really good if Xara could respond to a CANCEL or ESC.

Mike Engles

[This message was edited by mike engles on February 20, 2001 at 05:03 PM.]

[Klaus Nordby]

Mike Engles wrote: "It would be really good if Xara could respond to a CANCEL or ESC."

INDEED! It is STAGGERING how many programs - XaraX most shamefully included! - which STILL do not allow for the cancelling of operations in a normal, friendly, non-lethal way.

And yes, PROGRESS BARS for ALL time-consuming operations in XaraX would be another step on the road to adulthood.


K

[Klaus Nordby]

My sympathies for your lost work! But there's no need to be afraid of the Registry, so go ahead and make that save-backup change.

Of course, such an important function really SHOULB be accessible from the Options! As should a LOT of those deeply hidden Registry functions. Shame on Xara for not making the most important of them available in Options.


K

[Erik Heyninck]

I never had any previous versions before, I have observed the same thing Mike talks about. I mean:
the first time I tried to do something quite complex, nothing seemed to move anymore, so I thought XaraX was frozen, and I Ctrl+Alt+Deleted, feeling indeed very disappointed. But after seeing the far more complex things that are shown here on the forum, I tried again, and simply let things as they were. The result was that on my P800 machine with loads of RAM, I had to wait nearly FOUR minutes, but at the end, the task was fulfilled.
Of course this is not a real solution for the crash problem with big files.
Suggestion: why not activate the source meter, and check your memory sources regularly? Perhaps all the memory is already taken before you open Xara?

Me too, I wait for the patch, although I'm not really shure it will solve all our problems. But most known issues will be fixed, and that's already a relief.

On the other hand, Xara is not the only one to simply quit: nearly all programmes do, and even my friends with their Macs and Adobe apps admit they have regular problems.

[This message was edited by Erik Heyninck on February 20, 2001 at 11:29 PM.]

[jens g.r. benthien]

Ok girls and guys,

my question is: if you are a designer, illustrator etc to make a living of it, you certainly claim yourself being a 'professional'. Why in this world don't you - as a professional - use a professional operating system?

Instead of going for the hype and waste funds on a faster CPU or next generation board or whatever, use these funds to invest into a professional OS like NT or Windows 2000 Pro.

As long as you will contniue cutting potatoe stamps and using kids OS to complete your projects, I promise you will run into big trouble.

Look at it this way: compared to any other package from one of the nobrainer biggies (MM, Adobe) you saved a LOT on XARA X - invest this saving into a stable OS - it's worth it. Best of all: you will enjoy a hassle free computer life in the future.

Oh, before I forget: there is another alternative: go back to the good ol' drawing pad and a pencil - they don't need configs, backups, memory, installations, waiting times,......and best of all: they don't need updates and have a booting time of 0 milli secs

:-)

Success galore!

[mike engles]

Hello

Sean Sedwards has posted a script to enable Xara Backups

Mike Engles

[John F Dye]

Hi all,
This topic seems to hit lots of people where the live. aS to weather or not XaraX was responding I had waited a long time before giving up because I had a bad feeling about what would happen if I did Cntl/alt/del in this situation. I am running a PIII 650 with 192M RAM and decent Video card. It normally cooks right along even with Photos inserted although I can tell when I have run out of memory and it goes to the swap file. (It build the image is stages.) So anyway I don't think I interupted normal operation.
Has anyone had problems when using the Feather Slider? I still think it may have been at the root of my problem. This morning I am going to replace the feathered shadow with on made from a transparence blend. Its just a little tricky to get the effect I want.

[Sheff]

Today I had a hell of time with a file. I had created the file and attempted to print it. Forgetting that I had a print job that had been cancelled, I tried to print a file before I had saved it.

Now I am using 2000. I don't know where the issue lies, whether it is with the Epson drivers or Xara. I know that in frustration, I end up having to restart, and the machine asks me if I want to cancel the epson process. Unfortunately, this process isn't listed in the task manager. Until I reboot, I never have access to cancelling.

So I would like to have Xara quit whatever it is it is doing when I hit esc or ctrl-esc.

Shef

[John F Dye]

I went back into my drawing and removed the feathed shadow and replaced it with a blended linear transparency. Since then I have had not trouble with lock ups or crashes (Xara are you listening?) I don't know if the feather slider is causing the problem but my imperical data say every time I use it I start having slowdowns and lockups.
Incidently I am now running redundent files of the drawing, and used Sean's application to change the registry backup. I just have to be sure I start out with the most recient version each session [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] Anyway it looks like I'm back in business. Thanks to all for your help and support.
John