Hi, I’m new to scrivener and already in love with it. But, only after 3 days into my writing with scrivener, I find myself in trouble: this morning, scrivener crashed repeatedly, and each time it crashed merely 5 seconds after I start writing/editing my project.
I tried compile which worked; I tried to just read through the help document, which seems fine–means no crash. But, as soon as I start writing, 5 seconds later, it crashes.
Could somebody help me identify the problem?
I consider myself a writer in need of a good software. I cannot spend endless time trying to fix technical problems. This has slowed down my writing progress significantly. I don’t want to just give up and go back to Word, not just yet.
Help!
BTW, I’m using this version
Version: 1.7.2.0 - 02 Jul 2014
BTW, I’m not using anything funcy, just the binder and the editing windows (two windows open, two different sections of my project)
my laptop is running on windows 8.1, if that helps.
I’d greatly appreciate it if you can tell me where to start diagnosing these common problems next time I run into them.
I need a software to help me write, not to improve my computer skills or coding abilities.
Thx a million!
Does it matter that I’m writing in both English and Japanese in this particular project?
Will it ever matter that I later need to use Chinese, French, and Tibetan in other projects?
Given that the forums aren’t swamped with such reports, it is likely something local to your computer, rather than Scrivener itself. I have to defer to others on the mixed/multi-language question.
You might take a look at the following, not so much for the specifics, but just as an example of the sort of issue external to Scrivener you will need to look for.
https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/trial-program-crashes-when-creating-a-new-document/27533/1
You might also take a look at
https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/recent-project-wont-open-but/27382/1
To rule Scrivener itself out, consider uninstalling it, re-downloading it (to assure a current complete copy) and reinstall. But as noted in the thread above, there may be software present that conflicts during or after Scrivener installation.
Are you seeing any error messages displayed when the crash occurs?
Hope the above is of some assistance. Post back as to how things go.
Thx a million.
I’m quite sure it’s sth local. It’s now working fine. I just reinstalled scrivener.
however, I’m still concerned. I didn’t get any error message when scrivener crashed. Next time when similar things happen, how do I go about and deal with it?
If it’s sth local in my computer, could that be sth about windows 8.1 itself? Like I said, I wasn’t using anything fancy in scrivener, just imported my old word file into scrivener and started writing. and for 3 days it was fine, then it started to crash. I do use lots of footnotes, some of them quite long, but I didn’t use any software and I didn’t import any figures, videos, websites into my project.
If it’s windows 8.1 itself, do I need to stop updating it? just to avoid further compatibility issues?
How do I figure out which software is causing the crash? I mean I love scrivener, I’d be happy to let-go whatever else is in conflict with it. But I need to know what it is.
I’d greatly appreciate it if scrivener can give us a manual on how to deal with software conflicts:how to identify them, how to check for compatibility before installing other apps software, how to fix the problem when it happens. just a general rule of thumb will help, sth more than just uninstall and then reinstall.
I doubt that it is Windows 8.1 itself. I’ve used Scrivener on both the 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows 8.1, without problem.
The problem with trying to write such a manual is that one has to try to address the entire known/unknown universe of software. Though collecting and consolidating common issues is doable. One example of such would be the knowledgebase articles on the Scrivener (L&L) website under Support. These forums are another.
My experience was primarily in supporting a Windows XP dominated environment. We skipped Vista and were rolling 7 out when I retired. I had gotten pretty comfortable diving into the Windows XP event log to troubleshoot such. Would require some re-familiarization and study with 8, which I have so far avoided.
Sometimes it gets to be a real journey down the rabbit hole… Poring over voluminous Windows (and applications if they produce same) event logs and such, finding something obviously/not obviously related, then possibly having to do Internet searches for such/similar.
I’ll see if I can find a good intro article or book on the subject to recommend.
I’ll close with the following, which is largely a rehash of the Scrivener support page.
Apologies for any errors on my part. I defer to the Scrivener (L&L) folks.
You’ll see that I wimped out on pointing to materials on doing deep debugging oneself.
The learning curve is steep and intimidating.
Some preliminary notes regarding troubleshooting…
If you encounter a problem, crash, etc.,
pay close attention to and write up a note
describing what was going on at the time of the problem.
Note the date and time of the crash.
If any error messages were displayed,
write them down and/or get a screen shot.
Note whether you can recreate the crash or not.
Then, basically, follow the steps/sequence discussed on the Support page
literatureandlatte.com/support.php
Check the knowledge base articles (at least their titles)
to see if any of them touch on the problem you encountered.
The knowledge base is searchable.
Check the forums to see if the problem has been discussed.
If several folks have encountered the problem recently,
it may be obvious from recent topic titles.
More likely, you’ll need to browse
or search the forums (search field in upper right corner).
If you can’t find anything in the forums,
you can email technical support (see addresses on above web page).
They will presumably want a description of the problem,
the most recent dump (.DMP) file from the Scrivener program folder
minidump subfolder,
and possibly a compressed (.ZIP) copy of a project
that experiences the problem.
As far as trying to debug the problem yourself
if the above fails…
probably will involve reviewing the contents of various
Windows event logs around the time the problem was encountered
(Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer ).
And other stuff.
This tends to get nasty and deep pretty quickly.
If interested in getting into and learning such,
try searching for Internet articles and books using phrases like
“windows application crash debug”.
Thx. These are really helpful. At least I can start with taking notes next time when it crashes. The even log sounds a bit to much for me.