Rudolphus Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 I don't want to blame Designer Beta for this but I have to ask - is it possible for Designer Beta to cause the BSoD? I haven't seen this blue nightmare for years and that's why I am confused/worried/curious. Yesterday I was "playing" with the Beta for a few hours, maybe 4 or 5. At that time I edited one document and created another two. Nothing special, just some flowcharts. For that I needed arrowheads and chose the Designer Beta. During that I had only one weird problem (except of known bugs): I tried to use simple (and small 64 x 64 pixels with transparency) PNG file as a repeating bitmap fill. When I scaled the fill down to tiny size whole Beta was really-really sluggish for a while, even with a choppy mouse cursor movement. Then I set the fill back to solid and tried it again. This time without any trouble. So I went on working on the flowchart. To be honest, I was not at the computer at the time of the incident. I left Designer Beta opened and went to the kitchen for a cup of tea. When I came back after 5 minutes the BSoD was shining on the screen, saying no details, but the crash was caused by 'Memory management'. My configuration: i5-2500K@3.3GHz, 16GB RAM, Windows 10, 64-bit, Version 1809, Designer Beta 1.7.0.293 Note: there is no recent file in the 'reports' folder, only 'MEMORY.DMP' file (713MB) in the 'Windows' folder. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
narrationsd Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 So many ways a Windows PC can get these... I believe an application of any form isn't one of those, however. The most typical actual cause will be a Windows driver which is not fully compatible, or updated so it is. Display drivers are the most usual culprit -- and of course heavily invoked by graphics apps such as Affinity's That you had sluggishness leading up to the fail suggests something endemic like this was already in trouble -- and memory starvation, which shouldn't occur on a fully functional Windows, would defintely make sluggishness. Real fail should not occur because swapping will be invoked, unless you are also out of disk space. Swapping (ram to disk movements to keep ram free) would itself slow matters down. It is possible then that there's a memory leak in Designer current-Beta which your activities happened to excite, but if so, only slowdown should have happened, not a blue screen. Once again, though, 'because Windows', sensible view doesn't necessarily agree with what happens That you didn't apparently get a crash dump might suggest about low disk space? This is something you can look into... And, check your drivers for updates. I had been dead set against online offers to do this, but recently used Driver Easy (https://www.drivereasy.com/) to good advantage to discover a crucial one or two that Lenovo didn't bother to test, needed to keep up with Windows 10's machinations. Do be _very sure_ to create a Restore Point in Windows, as they recommend, before proceeding to install anything. I took one driver that was ok from a technical standpoint, but whose features differed from the original, such that my trackpad became almost unususable. Very comforting to be able to simply back out of that, which the Restore Point works well on in such a case. So, good fortune p.s. and by the way, it was Windows Update which was serving me the out-of-date driver (for a Broadcom wifi chip) -- Lenovo had signed out long ago, and I for a time believed the later Windows-offered driver was best available. It kept failing, however, hence the try with the apparently decent driver website. I would do all your checking and pre-scanning of downloads on that -- drivers would be a great place to introduce malware of course. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Sean P Posted May 14, 2019 Staff Share Posted May 14, 2019 Hi Rudolphus, According to development (see here) it is not actually possible for Affinity to cause a BSoD, it will only be a driver or hardware error as narrationsd has suggested above. I would be interested if you could reproduce the sluggishness you were getting however - if so please try and get a video! Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Ingram Posted May 14, 2019 Share Posted May 14, 2019 As @Sean P mentioned, please read my post in another thread about BSoD, but the general advice is, make sure (Windows and) your device drivers are up to date. Sean P 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rudolphus Posted May 14, 2019 Author Share Posted May 14, 2019 Thank you for your answers! They didn't make me happy though, because that means I have to look for the source of the crash somewhere else :o( And again, sorry, I did not want to blame the Designer Beta, but I was confused by the fact this has happened for the first time on this configuration after few years of fluent work and the only suspicious activity was the use of the Beta. On the other hand, the better one, that means I can use the Beta without any worry. To @Sean P: will try to reproduce it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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