Anna M Posted January 11, 2023 Share Posted January 11, 2023 Hi, I had been a HUGE fan of Affinity Designer ever since it was DrawPlus. Bought all versions, recommended to all colleagues. (I am a scientist and it is really good for scientific illustrations.) Until the last few months... Affinity products (Designer, Publisher, Photo) just crash. Crash. All. The. Time. I can't leave Designer open, open a telecon, and get back to Designer assuming it is still there. More likely than not, it won't be. To relaunch, I need to reboot, uninstall, reinstall. Close DisplayFusion. Close Xming (just in case). Close something else. Then reboot again. Maybe uninstall, reboot, reinstall, and reboot one more time. Maybe some combination of these. I've found that some praying might help, but it's not certain. Maybe check the website to see if there's a new version available. (I've purchased version 2 already, it didn't change anything, so money wasted.) This isn't an option every. other. time. (I kid you not!!!) when I'd love to use Designer. (Ideally, every day or most days.) I am tired of googling "Affinity crashing" every other day. Some webpages that come up on top have advice #1 to reboot, uninstall, reboot, reinstall, reboot, close everything else, try again and pray. Advice #2 is to uninstall Affinity and go to Adobe. It looks like many people are in my boat. There are lots of advices, which I followed (including acceleration in settings, when it finally launches of course, closing other programs, etc). To be honest, advice #2 seems more and more appealing lately. Because one can't take a product seriously if every other time it needs to be run you got to reboot, uninstall, reboot, reinstall, reboot, close everything else, run, and pray... The reason for the desperate tone of this post is that right now, it crashed one more time. I do need to make an illustration for work today, but I have an ssh to a remote server with some processes going on, and some coding stuff open locally, so rebooting is, again, a major hassle. I had it open and it froze. Again, as it always does. So I'm down to no Designer. I've been such a huge fan and supporter always. Made so many scientific posters and illustrations. But what's going on is simply making the product unusable. I don't know what to do, short of uninstalling and looking for alternatives... I feel like I've wasted my money on buying ver. 2. That's me, a huge long-standing fan saying this. Please help -- are there other ways? Please fix. This can't go on like this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RichardMH Posted January 11, 2023 Share Posted January 11, 2023 Do you have hardware acceleration on? If so try with it off. Edit->Preferences->Performance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anna M Posted January 11, 2023 Author Share Posted January 11, 2023 It is turned off. I'd take a screenshot, but it won't load on me right now... I'd have to do multiple reboots, reinstalls, uninstalls, some praying, but it's not certain... I cannot reboot right now because of other things running. (They do not consume a lot of memory, like ssh or other coding applications, but are a major pain to bring back to the same state after a reboot.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RichardMH Posted January 12, 2023 Share Posted January 12, 2023 Next thing to try is to reset user defaults. Hold control when you start it up. If you have assets etc back them up but with your problems I guess you can't do that. I've heard the Affinity guys are very busy so not sure when they can get to you. What system are you on? Windows or mac? If you can find some crash reports and post them the cleverer people might see what the problem is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anna M Posted January 12, 2023 Author Share Posted January 12, 2023 I am on Windows. I cannot start it anymore with ctrl+ option, it seems. Affinity isn't installed in your usual "Program Files" any longer, but instead, in "Program Files/WindowsApps/SerifEuropeLtd.AffinityDesigner2_2.0.3.1688_x64__3cqzy0nppv2rt/" And for that, I do not have permissions to execute anything. * * * After A LOT of hassle, I managed to give myself "write" permissions to the designer.exe.config file to make it this: * * * I suspect in order to properly run designer.exe from this folder, I might need to go through this manual hassle for every single file in this folder? (No, just "claiming ownership" does not work. I am already the owner, I did this for all files in WindowsApps. So on top of that, in order to edit this config file, I had to add a new permission group, in which I'd manually write myself. I do not know how it works.) * * * Also, I don't see anything in %USERPROFILE%\.affinity\Designer\2.0\CrashReports\reports. * * * Please tell me I need to go through this every other time when Affinity freezes on me?.. How is this acceptable... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dan C Posted February 22, 2023 Share Posted February 22, 2023 Hi @Anna M, Thanks for your report and our sincerest apologies for the delayed response here. We are exceptionally busy following the release of V2 and we thank you for your continued patience and understanding here. On 1/12/2023 at 12:30 PM, Anna M said: Please tell me I need to go through this every other time when Affinity freezes on me?.. How is this acceptable... We're certainly sorry to hear you're having trouble with Designer and we would not expect these steps to be required for any users. Windows specifically reduces permissions to these folders and we don't specifically recommend adjusting these permissions as it may cause further issues with the Affinity and other Windows apps. Since your report we have released Affinity v2.0.4 with multiple bug fixes and improvements that I hope will resolve these issues for you. Equally, we now offer an 'EXE' version of Affinity V2 which will install in the regular ProgramFiles folder and doesn't require changing any permissions to access. Therefore I'd recommend uninstall the MSIX versions that you have currently, then downloading and installing the EXE versions from the below link, selecting the Also Available : EXE option - Photo - https://store.serif.com/update/windows/photo/2/ Designer - https://store.serif.com/update/windows/designer/2/ Publisher - https://store.serif.com/update/windows/publisher/2/ Once you have uninstalled the MSIX versions and installed the EXE versions, please also ensure your GPU drivers are up to date as outdated drivers are the number one cause of crashing in Affinity. Please visit the manufactures link below to download the latest driver available - - Intel: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/detect.html - Nvidia: https://www.geforce.com/drivers - AMD: https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/gpu-driver-autodetect Note: you may need to go direct to your PC manufactures website for the driver, if you see a warning regarding 'OEM drivers' when trying to install one from the above sites. Once downloaded and installed, please restart your computer and then launch the Affinity app again. Please do let me know if this helps Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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