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Affinity Designer Taking a Long Time To Start Up


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Hello

This problem started about a week ago and I am not sure why. I have not changed any settings or made any changes I am aware of that could have caused this. Before it would normally only take about 30 seconds to start, now it is taking 3- 5 minutes, just for the application to open.

I am not sure which error logs I should check if any so any help would be appreciated.

I am using:

Window 10

8GB RAM

i3 CPU

Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471

Thank you!

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Hi Callum

Thanks for the reply, as a matter of fact I have! Could this be the problem? I did try re-install Designer but the same thing.

Is there a way to check which fonts may be causing the issue? I have a lot as you can imagine so am not sure how to proceed.

Thank you for the help!

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@Jyscal, answer is possibly get and use a font manager.

- this way you don't have to hve all fonts loaded all the time

- you can arrange them in (overlapping if you like) groups, according to task

- you can list favorites

- more complete ones have analyzers for duplicates and font problems, which will help aoid slowness and possible app crashes

 

Which are good? Well, I haven't really favored most; they tend to stall in contemporary development, or be awkward. The one I liked best, NexusFont , was nicely presented, but the developer moved on.

There are  the expensive ones...most of the rest have free not-very-limited tryouts so you can see. The one with an endless-draining subscription has, of course, a gaming-you very limited tryout.

 

- MainType may have some balance of awkwardness and features; it will ding you for paying every time; the trick to shortcut  its button-hopper is to say you'll pay, then cancel, until you do choose to

- Typograf might be worth a look, if it's quite opinionated

- if an office pays, one of the higher priced might be worth their hundred Euros

- the best I expect is to ask your better printer or layout/design pals, see  what they prefer...

good fortune - be the foxy hunter (since this forum knew there was an emoji -- and curtly refused it)

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Hello

I tried going with NexusFont and it did find a few duplicates. I removed the fonts I had installed recently, there were only 3 of them, but the problem persists.

In fact after I restarted my machine, I started AD it started relatively quickly. The 2nd time was a nightmare. 10 - 15 minutes for the application to start up. When i looked in Task Manager, I saw 100% Disk Usage and that AD was using 4.8GB of RAM. Even when it opened it sat on 5GB RAM with no files open. Being my machine only has 8GB it brought it to a crawl and I had to restart.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the application with no difference.

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Hmm, sounds something is really wrong here. You mean you see the problems without opening some gargantuan document, will suppose -- and second open should be if anything faster than the first, as Windows caches at least portions of apps.

I have a lot of fonts, probably, and Designer takes just over 400_M_B, Publisher 800 on the fat magazine demo which also has a lot of large images.

It wouldn't hurt matters if you afforded 16MB as more reasonable memory these days, especially if you want to run several programs like Affinity's efficiently, and there's always a lot of responsiveness to be gained by going to an SSD from the usual hard disk, but you shouldn't be seeing what you are without these.

I'm not going to be able to contribute more this time, but here's Microsoft's instruction page for ways to start your laptop in what they call Safe Mode.

    MS Safe Mode

Safe Mode will let you see what happens without all the add-on invisible programs we end up with, running in the background and sometimes interfering in significant ways with programs that are well designed on their own.

If Affinity runs nicely in Safe Mode, then you can look into taking out extra background apps -- there are lots of instructions for going about this on the web, perhaps easy to find if you also mention Safe Boot. The efficient way is often referred to as bisecting, or binary search, meaning you take out a noted half of those apps, then see; if no change, take half of the remaining half; or if change, put back in half of what you took out, etc..

Many of the background apps can be disabled from your Task Manager's Startup tab -- easiest to start with these. Others are Services, which you can look up how to disable also, for a rapid test before deciding to de-install anything.

I guess it should be said that another way you could be having problems is if you've caught a virus or trojan; I tend to think of having excellent protection and habits always, but these can slip through and use your machine for all sorts of things. Norton Security is for many years very efficient and very good, and they also have a power cleaner if you find  yourself deep in problems. Depending on skills etc., that's the sort of thing where a trusted local service could turn out to be useful.

Hadn't intended on covering a gamut, but there we are...

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Hi.

Thank you for the help, I do appreciate it. At this point I pretty much give up. This program has been basically unusable forcing me to use alternative software just to get my work done. This is a bit ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with my computer. Everything else is working 100% correctly. NO issues. I start up AD and the system just crumbles. I KNOW it is AD because when I use the Beta it starts a little quicker but still not how it used to be. There are no other issues with any other software. The problem is with Affinity Designer.

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Just spotted your reply, Jyscal...

Well, 'KNOW'ing things are ok on any Windows machine isn't all that easily reckoned, so patience is probably in order. 

I was looking above to see who else might have offered tips, and wonder if you've tried as @Callum from Affinity suggested, _removing_ those extra fonts you recently added, all of them? You might well be surprised at the result...or yes, not.

Also, you might look at the size of the user community, and realize your experience isn't what very many are seeing, which is a way of knowing matters can be more positive.

Now, these Affinity apps have at times been slow on font loading when in much earlier betas, but I just cold-started the latest released Design, with hundreds of fonts, and it was up in about 20 seconds. This is on a reasonably fast laptop, probably most importantly to say having an SSD. InDesign, a comparable program to Publish and this set in general, took a little over half that.

But also...here's a substantiation for the way I'm telling you this story...

Actually, both these times, especially InDesign's which was much slower, are definitely faster than I have been experiencing, for some interval.

And what is different is that I had a big upset on the machine last week, due to a bogus Microsoft update of Windows, and in concert with some very sharp depth-level support people you can actually reach there (in India...!) , with enough persistence in such cases, in essence the entire Windows 10 operating system got cleared and reinstalled, along with a number of necessary adjustments. Yes, this can be done, and it's better than what they used to tell you, which was just to start from scratch and rebuild the machine in toto. The new way, your apps and files stay undisturbed...and actually did, including some with dire copy protection.

I am not suggesting you do such a thing, please be confident. I am just noting that on  my own would have to admit somewhat expertly maintained machine, which I had felt was as clean as experience could say, it obviously wasn't, just in the ways we are aware Windows always has been able to fall apart, invisibly, crumbling from within.

What I would do, is try the step of taking out all those new fonts. If that doesn't clear the problem adequately, the font manager solution I proposed will allow you to slim down to just what you need, which should get you through, and may even help see where there may be a corrupt font install.  Those are very, very well known to be able to clobber any particular software -- and yes, not necessarily _every_ software.

If you find the bad one, you could even send it to Affinity, so they could add some additional bullet-proofing for its problems.

Hoping this with above will help you, and anyone else who hits such a frustration...

Clive

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Hi, Sorry only saw your response now as well :)

I will certainly have to have a look at what the problem is exactly, and as you said removing the fonts and seeing what happens.  Just on a side note. I have downloaded and am now using the new Beta that was released and it works perfectly. Loads up in less than a minute, no lag when editing. I am not sure why the other program is acting up. I have Illustrator as well, and it loads in less than a minute and works perfectly. So did the AD Beta prior to the one just released.

At least I have a usable program again so I'm happy :)

Thank you so much for patience and assistance in this regard. I really do appreciate it and if I can return the favor one day I certainly will!

Take care.

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