This does not appear to be a Windows Scrivener problem because if it were there would be many more bug reports about crashing.
Have you contacted Parallels as that seems to be what’s different about your setup?
Have you tried Windows not-XP? XP is all I use, natively, and it works fine.
Have you tried the trial Scrivener for Mac?
There is no difference between the trial software and the full version, so I’d definitely hold off on buying until you can get the software to work reliably on your system.
I agree with Almansur - I’m not aware of any issues like this with the current version (I presume you are using the current version - v1.2.5?), so anything out of the ordinary on your implementation has a good chance of being the cause… so Parallels may have something to do with it.
Is there a reason why you’re running the Windows version via Parallels instead of the native Mac version? The Mac version has more features at the moment and also has a free trial available.
It is the latest version. I run a whole company on Windows so everything is geared to that OS. I have never encountered such a problem before with any other application, and I have dozens. Since this posting I have been trying to run it again and I have discovered the crashing occurs intermittently when clicking on the menus or sub-menus on the left Binder Tool Bar, e.g. adding, or duplicating a Character Sketch or attempting some other function. I really need this to work in Windows.
Thanks for all suggestions.
I’ve done a quick search and can’t see anything on the forum about Parallels causing issues so that might be a red herring. Although one thing that does spring to mind to be worth checking is: How much RAM have you assigned to your virtual machine? And are you running many other RAM hungry programs at the same time? 4GB is more than enough, but if you’ve set the allocation low and are driving the virtual machine it might be overloading it?
You’ve done the right thing in emailing windows support - that will have raised a ticket and someone will get back to you soon. They should be able to dig down a little deeper and help you find the cause.
Thanks for taking the time to look into this. I very much appreciate your effort. Regarding Memory for the VM I have set the amount of up to 1.5 GB so that should not be a problem.
The only apps I have open at the same time is Chrome, Word and Eudora (Yes, I love Eudora because it has a lot of versatility for my needs)
I have read that Scrivener is auto backing up every 2 seconds or so, and I am wondering if that action is clashing with the CPU or something.
Regarding Scrivener support. I am pretty shocked they have not jumped all over this on the basis that I am a POTENTIAL customer. Sales must good for them.
To give you a bit more info on the auto save… It’s not an ‘autobackup’ as such… Backup (in Scrivener language at least) means a complete copy of your entire project stored somewhere safe. What Scrivener does is save any changes you have made every time you have 2 seconds of inactivity. It only needs to save the changes (not the whole file), and it only does it when your not typing etc when there’s reduced demand anyway, so it’s got a pretty low CPU footprint.
Certainly sounds likes you’ve got plenty of RAM given the software you’re running. Oh well, worth checking!
Hrm, I bounce between Scrivener on WINE (Windows version) and the Linux native build. (Spellchecker is wonky and it likes to crash if you do certain things, but it’s otherwise peachy, if you don’t mind adding a lot of words to the spellchecker and don’t need to add files to Research. But that’s why it’s still in beta. Conversely, I can load jpegs in the Linux one, but that seems to be broken with WINE, although I play Guild Wars 2 with WINE, so I’ve no idea what its issue is.)
On WINE I only have crash issues if the C++ runtime (now 2010) isn’t installed. If you’re using XP, it’s not installed by default, so you’ll have to make sure it’s installed.
I know there are people who’ve used it on VM’s, and it takes dink memory, comparatively speaking (1% of system RAM on a large project, as opposed to upwards of 3-5% for google chrome.) If Scrivener runs out of memory, files will seem to “disappear” within the project, and you’ll see a blue scroll bar in the upper right-hand corner of the editor. Have you noticed any of that?
