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Hi guys, I recently upgraded to XP (athlon64 w/ 512 megs ram) however I'm finding that xara x crashes quite often under this OS. I was wondering if anyone else has had the same problem? I haven't upgraded to xara x1, since I am waiting for xara2X (unfortunately, there are some things in the prime version I'm not too crazy about http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/frown.gif
Hi guys, I recently upgraded to XP (athlon64 w/ 512 megs ram) however I'm finding that xara x crashes quite often under this OS. I was wondering if anyone else has had the same problem? I haven't upgraded to xara x1, since I am waiting for xara2X (unfortunately, there are some things in the prime version I'm not too crazy about http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/frown.gif
Hi Cliff
I ran xara x under XP home for about a year with little or no crashes. Maybe you have a bad install. Have you tried remove and reinstall?
Matter of fact, I still have x on my XP machine but do not use it enough to make a call one way or another.
John, I'm running on xp home service pack 2, but occassionally I have crashes even loading small simple files. I have the same problem on win98 but usually only when opening complex xar files (usually 1-3 meg xar files using lots of texts and transparencies/bitmaps)
I'm installing off of the xara setup cd so I don't know why the install could be bad http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/frown.gif Especially on a new system.
hey Clif i am running xara x1 on windows xp pro sp2 with 1.8ghz atalon and 512 ram in a hp notebook and it runs fine. i usually have that open and photoshop a html editor and a ftp client all running at the same time and have zero issues.
wow Mike, that's pretty much the same setup I have!! And you've never once had xara crashed during or immediately after opening up a xar file?
I'm thinking that this could be related, but do you have many fonts installed?
I tend to notice that files with either fonts, moulds or clipframes tend to crash.
lots of fonts and plugins. my notebook is maxed out to the gills. i used to have spontanous internal errors but i was using complicated contours and brushes. i since have stopped (it was only one drawing i was doing that kept crashing) now i am just doing some web work on the side and i use all those programs at once. i would do what John said uninstall and reinstall. also clean your reg of all instances of xara, make a seperate folder on your cd drive for your plugins and another for your brushes and moulds. that should fix your problems. dont store all that stuff in your xara irectory. hope this helps some
They say not to run an OS with more than 500 fonts installed as it will cause issues and slow down the performance but I have over 1000 fonts installed and have NO issues with my setup. Going on 2 years, home built box. Pen IV - 1 1/2 Gigs of DDR RAM and WinXP Pro (SP 1+) on a nice Gigabyte Graphics motherboard.
Personally I think it may be a hardware thing or maybe not enough RAM. You have DDR RAM or the older SDRAM RAM chips?? DDR RAM allows for faster transferance of information to be swapped out. If you got too many fonts or some other issue going on sometimes adding RAM may help smooth it all out, sometimes not!
I'm not sure why some systems, no matter what you do to them act up and other, similar builds even, don't!! I know my Gateway computers (both) gave me hell. My home built box is just a dream come true for me. With the Gateway boxes Xara X and previous versions crashed all the time. Dun'no, seems strange and confusing when trying to figure out this kind of thing!! What video card are you using?? I was having SOME small issues with my 3D work and I switched out to a nVidia Geoforce FX 5700 and all is well!! If you are interested in checking out this card, it's quite affordable for most folks, under $100.00 from Newegg.com . Brand name and product description can be found here: Chaintech-nVidia GeoForce FX5700
I used to run Xara X on a crappy 256mb RAM machine on XP, no problems. And on my home computer a 1.5ghz 528MB SDRAM computer, also no problems.
To me the worst problem with Xara X on XP was just the random errors that actually did nothing, like after coming back to a machine and unlocking/waking it. But no crashes that I can recall.
If that "Athlon64" referres to a 64bit chip, i might be inclined to check into that for the cause/cure.
My only other thoughts reside in the graphics card area. Bad drivers.
clif,
Please let us know what you find out. I am contemplating an Anthlon64 for my next computer and would hate for that to be the cause. Until I hear more about the sempron I am hessident. the celeron is garbage compared to the pentium 4.
Hi,
I am running all my pograms on my computer wich I just upgraded to an Asus X series 64bit athalon chip with no problems. I have he K8V-X series Asus motherboard with GeForce 6500 256MB graphic accelerator video board. I run corelDraw12, PhotoPaint12 DreamweaverMX, XaraX, Swishmax and some of Microsofts word, excel, with no problems. I have 1Gb memory insalled.
the increase in speed is great.
Jim
Quote:
Originally posted by John Rayner:
clif,
Until I hear more about the sempron I am hessident. the celeron is garbage compared to the pentium 4.
John the Sempron is a cheaper chip designed to compete with the celron. i would definitly go with the 64. i am going to build a new box soon and that will be the cpu of choice
I've been running X1 on a 64 since last spring. No problems. Haven't had a reason to install Classic since I replaced the mobo, but it was running fine on the 64 before that.
BTW, I would definitely go with the Asus mobo. This machine came with an MSI, which we replaced with the Asus after 6 months. It was the 2nd MSI I've had, and both had problems.
Thanks for the suggestions everyone:
I am using Xara x classic from the CD. (ver 1.1D)
Let me first give the detailed info on my system so we can rule out any obvious problems.
I'm working on a brand new HP laptop preloaded w/ windows xp home service pack 2, DDR 512 meg ram, Athlon 64 1.8ghz. The video card is 64 DDR meg Nvidia GeForce 4 440.
I have not upgraded or modified the notebook, but I have already scanned the hard disk for errors. I don't think the issue is faulty hardware or drivers because again as stated above the system
is brand new and very up to date.
My previous system: PC Windows 98, 512 DDR ram, 1.7 Athlon Thoroughbred, asus mobo, Nvidia GeForce FX5200, ( it's either 64-128 meg)
I've noticed that certain small xara files will crash immediately upon opening or saving. Even during drawing, xara is very susceptible to crashing even when the mouse cursor is perfectly still! When a file does crash during saving, it will
crash immediately.
I've recorded a couple of error screens I've recently got and this is what it says:
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
Floating point exception at offset 0X004FD4E2
and
Floating point exception at offset 0X6635CC1E
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
- I have tried to open certain files I know can crash immediately on the notebook, on my pc. They open fine - however crashes do occur on my PC too using win98, but seldomly and only when I'm using
xara files consisting of fonts, moulds of clipviews and have had xara open for a prolonged period of time (ie. 3-4 hours+).
- Even during fresh bootup, some xara files will crash on the laptop when I open the file. Therefore, I can rule out that it is due to having xara opened for a prolonged period of time.
I'm guessing it could be xp related, since I did had a similar problem with photoshop where I could not run the software because it kept on crashing at nearly every single mouseclick.
- I have less than 300 fonts on my pc, and about the same on the laptop. I don't beleive it could be the fonts, though I wouldn't rule it out entirely because I do recall at one time, decreasing the number of
system fonts resulted in better performance and less crashing.
Anyways, I'll keep playing around and see what I find. I'm happy to see that everyone seems to have xara classic run fine on XP. If anyone does have similar experiences like mine however, please do post. Thanks!
Mike S.: I never use brushes or contours or plugins, so we can rule those out. I did reinstall xara but no luck http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/frown.gif
RamWolff: I do have an nvideo card for both the pc and laptop. Granted there both separate models on separate platforms but there is much noticeable crashing on the laptop. I do suspect it could be related
to the fonts somehow, but some files which do not contain fonts, will still crash on opening.
AnthonyF: CorelXara2, rarely crashed for me and I was running on a horribly slow 200mhz. I wish I could get my new system up and running and determine what's causing X to have all these errors
Mark: I've had this similar problem using a Pentium4 on Windows NT, so for now I think for we can rule out the CPU
John: Actually, I did a test and my Athlon 1.7 Thoroughbred ran a bit faster than the Athlon64 on the laptop using xara! To be honest, I haven't found programs to be running exceedingly fast with this chip.
My pc on windows 98 runs much faster.
Mac: I'm hoping to upgrade my ram too - it would be nice to have xara run even faster than it already does - but prices for ram upgrades on laptops are quite expensive http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/frown.gif
Alison: I can't exchange my mobo since the system is brand new - I don't think it is the motherboard causing the errors though.
Sorry, the second error should be 0X0035CC1E
does anyone here know of a freeware that lets me check and fix corrupted fonts? I have a suspiscison these errors could be a result of using foreign language fonts.
If you suspect a corrupted font. What you could do is find out what the minimum systems fonts are, then start uninstalling them until you find the one/s that are bad. i would pull groups of 50. then groups of twenty five, 10 etc until you narrow it down to the bad fonts.
you wont notice the programs or windows running any faster as they are 32 bit programs. if and when the 64 bit programs start coming out then you will notice the differnce. you really should go to windows and download Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Release Candidate 2 (RC2). see if that fixes your problem. here is one thing they say Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is designed to address the most demanding needs of technical workstation users who require large amounts of memory and floating point performance in areas such as mechanical design and analysis, digital content creation and scientific and high-performance computing applications.
i would throw on a partition install it and load your programs on the partition and see if your problem goes away. here is the link windows 64
Sorry about the long post trying to help narrow down your problem
John: I tried doing as you said. Unfortunately it didn't work http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/frown.gif I was down to only 24 fonts, and xara still kept crashing repeatedly on xp
Mike: Is that program for windows home xp? I have service pack 2, but i'm not sure I'm able to install the professional trial software
no it is the next windows for 64but proccesors. make a partition on your hdd and install the os. when you boot up you will have a boot menu that will show xp home and xp 64 pro. it is a full blown windows os. i am thinking that is causing your problems your cpu is running instructions for a 64 bit os and you are running a 32 bit os. its a wild card guess. hell i might even be totally wrong here but its worth a shot plus you will get to see your cpu run at its potential. are you having any other issues with software besides xara? if so you can start narrowing the problem towards the os and not the programs you are using.
thanks for the info Mike. The laptop is shared so I wouldn't be allowed to install another os. All other programs run fine - except fpr xara and occasionally photoshop.
One interesting thing to note is that if a certain file loads, and I take the hand tool and push the drawing around the screen (as to shake the screen image vigrourously) xara will crash and give me one of the above errors. I think there is something wrong with the redrawing that may be related to the video card or it's settings?
Perhaps someone from xara might know what those errors numbers mean?
Question:
Did your "upgrade" mean you upgraded to XP via the upgrade disk.
I've heard there are hardware issues in doing so and if the hardware involves your graphic card, then it could very well be part of you problem.
It was recommended to me to clean PCs drive totally and then use the non-upgrade XP disk.
Hi Clif,
Those error numbers don't mean very much to me I'm afraid but it's interesting that they are both floating point exceptions.
We upgraded some of the font handling maths in X1 to avoid some overflow problems that were found with certain fonts in X.
I understand you don't want to use X1 but could you try downloading and installing the X1 trial just to see whether that behaves better for you? You should be able to install X1 in a separate folder.
John, I didn't upgrade manually. When we purcahased the laptop everything was pre-installed by HP. It is currently running on the latest build of XP home.
Phil, I downloaded the trial of X1 home on my laptop and the errors seemed to dissapear!! Thanks! It's strange though because I deleted all but 24 system fonts, and Xara X classic still kept crashing - even on files that didn't use fonts http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/frown.gif
I'll keep testing x1 to see if any new errors occur and keep anyone who follows this post updated.
One word explains this problem...
Microsucs...