First off, let me apologize upfront. I know there are some diehard Corel fans out there (I used to be one of them) and so nothing personal. This is just my recent experience after coming back to Corel after a few year away.
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I’ve missed my buddy DRAW. I had been using it for so many years I felt I could do almost anything with it, and I wanted my buddy back.
It had been about five years since I worked with CorelDraw. Illustrator has been a reliable piece of software and since online stock sites require eps files, using Illustrator made the most sense as I create a lot of stock images. But that monthly fee to Adobe was something I just did not feel good about.
I tried Affinity Designer and though it is great software, it’s still missing a few key features that I consider necessary for my drawing style. So, I thought “maybe Corel has made some progress and worked out some of the bugs since X6.” So, I created a new partition on my mac and installed Win 10 and CorelDraw Graphic Suite 2017, and set down to work.
It took less than an hour before the first crash. Wow, REALLY?! Fresh install, updated software, no customization to the interface? Not even virus protect other than Windows Defender. Are you kidding? Yup, nothing has changed since the last time I used it. Maybe a fluke? So, I kept going and…yup, another crash, then another, this time losing about a half hours of work. At some point, DRAW stopped saving but let me continue to work, proven by the outdated backup file.
Currently, I am working with Corel Tech Support to figure out why I have slow launch times, like over 4 minutes. I was told to reinstall/repair the application, delete temp files, reset Corel to defaults even though it was set to defaults, update to the latest version (it was), and here is the fun one...create a new Windows user account. Really!? I told them that this sounds like a workaround rather than a fix.
I don’t understand. After these many years, I would think Corel or any software would have better knowledge on how to prevent instabilities and make a decent piece of software. I know, I know, I’m not a programmer and I don’t know how any of this works, but dang COMMON. I have minimal problems with other software, even FREE software like Blender and Gimp. Then again most of my work in done on a mac so maybe that is the difference.
As I mentioned, I was a big Corel user and so I guess I didn’t know how messed up Corel was until I used something else for a long enough time to become proficient with it. When I started using Corel again, I was surprised at how little it had changed. And not only is DRAW an unstable beast but PhotoPaint is outdated, Corel Capture is useless, Corel Connect is unnecessary and missing real functionality (compared to Adobe Bridge), and Web Creator (web creator? really?) is an antique. Adobe has come so far in comparison, and if Affinity keeps doing what they do over there at Serif they are going to kill Corel’s market, and they make software for both Win and Mac platforms, something I and many others have been ***’n to Corel about for years.
Bottom line, I’m angry that I spent the money on Windows 10 and Corel Graphics Suite 2017, and disappointed Corel has done basically nothing to advance its software.
I'm sure I am upsetting the hardcore Corel users, and I am sorry for that, but sometimes the truth hurts. At one time I too thought Corel was the best but now that I forced myself to work with something else I have realized I was wrong. Corel is not the best, far from it.
I too would call myself a diehard Draw fan, but am certainly not a Corel apologist, indeed I would consider myself one of Corels biggest critics. I feel your pain as I too have experienced terrible unstable installs of Draw and there are some who would blame me, the user for using Xeon processors!.
Now, I assume you are dual booting rather than running in a vrtual machine? Do you by any chance have access to an install disk for Windows 7? The only reason I ask is that there have been so many updates to Win10 that it is difficult to know whether they might be the cause. At least Win7 is relatively change free.
Draw is not terribly reliable and has myriad legacy bugs, but one thing I think I can pinpoint as being part of the problem is disk read/write times. Draw introduces some background task abilities in recent versions and I believe these are not terribly robust. Since I installed an SSD I am finding the instances of crashes much reduced, though this only handles my OS and applications drives, my data is still on traditional HDD's on a NAS. You could rty turning off background tasks just to see if there's a difference. It will slow you down but it is probably more reliable IME.
I am assuming you have plenty of memory available as its so cheap these days? Anything under 6Gb would be considered limiting , 12-20 would be advisable.
Thanks for you thoughts. I am running a dual boot with 32 G of DDR3. In the past I have run Windows 7 in a VM and to be honest I didn’t have many problems. But I thought dual boot(ing) would only improve the experience. I guess I was wrong.
I am just so dumbfounded as to how Corel could let things get this bad. It seems they just don’t care anymore. And I tell you what, they better get on the ball or Affinity Designer and Photo is going to take away what little money they are making.