Need tips, advice on upgrading...

I've been absent so long I'm surprised my login still worked! Finally this year I feel the need to upgrade from my Xara Xtreme Pro (3.0) which has been my ultimate favorite program for, gosh, 4 or 5 years, starting with Xara1.

I assume from the Website that I'll want "Designer Pro" ?? First questions I have is, will it install like a new program, as Xara1 and XXPro did? Would I uninstall the ones I have now before installing a new one? I still run XPHome with no plans to upgrade in the near future. Thanks in advance. ~Helen~

Hi Helen, nice to see you again.

You can install Designer Pro without a need to uninstall either Xara X¹ or XXP 3. I have several versions on each of my machines. My Old XP machine has Xara X, X¹, XXP3, XXP4, XXP5, etc.

You should have no problems with Designer Pro on XP I still have XP on one of my machines and Designer Pro works perfectly fine.

Designer Pro will work but there is a chance that at least one function may not. One that might not work is the magic eraser. This is machine dependant, not operating system dependant.

This will depend on what type of machine you have. My favourite machine is old, it is an AMD +1800 (translation- 1.5 Ghz machine). Because my machine is so old, there are a couple of routines in the program that don't work and they give the error below.

This is an interesting technical description of what happens and what CPUs don't support SSE2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2

My machine was actually used as an example for Xara to create this error msg because it originally did not give any msg, it just gave some numbers that were meaningless to me which the Xara folks noticed on the threads here at TG. See, they do pay attention, especially during releases!!! Xara support asked me to do some tests and voila!, you now have a new error message if you have an older machine like mine.

Having said all this, you could download the trial, test it out on your machine to ensure all is as it should be. As far as I can tell, the other functions of the program work fine so it is a fine package even without magic eraser.

Just so you don't think I am feeling deprived for not being able to run magic eraser, I have another machine with Pro7 on it and all the functions work fine but I prefer my older machine....I guess it's just love.