Iv been a Corel user since 1994 and the last version I bought was 11 and have used it happily. I moved to X5 for the new features and multi core support. Iv had to redo so much work as a result of using Corel Draw X5. To clarify, I do have the boxed retail edition of X5 and never had the demo running the aft mentioned machine.
I would say I have a fast and capable enough machine to run X5. I have a Corei7 920 running at 4.3Ghz , 6Gb's of RAM, a ATI HD5770 and im running Win 7 64bit. Its a fresh install. The overclock is solid and have torture tested running two instances of Prime95 pushing all cores, 8 threads to 100% for 25 hours with no errors. Memory tested with Memtest 15 hours with no errors. Windows 7 is fully updated, No Anti Virus installed, and the only other Applications installed are After Effects CS4 and Cinema4D Studio R11.5. I had many of the same issues in the Corel X5 trial on my WindowsXP SP3 machine.
Yes i have had the same results not overclocked. After Effects and C4D have been Solid.
Uninstall and reinstall shows no improvement in the issues faced. Safe mode=no change, F8 on PP startup= no change.
LIke some of the other Corel versions I had, i had to wait for service packs and patches to have a solid running copy of Corel. But in a professional setting, using software that has this many issues seriously hurts productivity and is a time and money waister. Iv read numerous posts here and in other forums of people having issues like mine or worse with X5.
I am basically a Corel fan, since Corel 6 but....
While I'm waiting for my new HPZ600 to arrive with quad processor,10G RAM etc etc I have loaded CorelX5 onto my old HP Compaq dx7300 with a Pentium D 3.00Ghz and only 1 G RAM. Op sys is XP Pro 2002 Sv Pack 3. My Corel X3 runs just about ok on this. X5 runs slowly but enough to check out new features and use macros etc. Currently all settings are default on X5.
Problem - About 40% of the time when I try to open files created in Corel X3 in X5 the file starts opening, the 'opening progress' bar at the bottom goes along to about 'half way' then the whole program crashes and shuts down. Yet other X3 files open no problem.
Observations – After doing lots of different things I finally got round to running exhaustive tests on 2 files that crashed X5. By a process of elimination I was able to get to a single object that was the cause of the crash….. even when it was copied and pasted to its own new file that new file would not open. (Also retested – The original file opened ok if all was present except this object). In each case it was uniform fill that was the problem. If I either deleted (x’d) the fill or created a new fill as a fountain fill then the file opened ok in X5. If I simply changed the uniform fill to a different colour then the problem persisted. This is ok as a work around for a few files but a big headache otherwise.
Question - I'm thinking.... how I am going to access all those Corel X3 files I need without having to spend time checking for the one object (needle in the haystack) that seems to be causing the crash ????????