Rindis.com

Well, one bit of optimistic news I originally reported on my transition to Win7 went bad.

CorelDraw 8 installed fine, and ran fine, at first. I noticed a little later that it was a bit crash-happy. In fact, it started fine, and then slowly got worse. It didn’t take long until it was crashing on application launch.

This could just have been something going wrong once, and then cascading into a worse problem, and a uninstall/reinstall would fix it, more-or-less permanently. But I didn’t like the fact that it happened after a fairly low number of launches. So, I looked around for alternatives.

The current version of CorelDraw is X5 (15). There were a bunch of copies of X4 on eBay through one guy, that was just the disk and (supposedly) a valid reg number for $45. The star rating was low, but I saw it go up over a couple of days, so I figured people were getting product and being happy with it, a good sign. And then all his listings disappeared the day before I would have gone for it. The account seems active, but pointers to his listings go to empty pages. Not good. And then similar listings appeared on other, 0-star accounts (different images). I think I’m very happy I missed out on that.

I ended up bidding on a copy that claimed to be an unopened box with all the manuals. Just squeeked out a win at $50 (someone tried to snipe it at $50 and failed). It arrived yesterday. Indeed, unopened box in what looks to be the original shrink wrap. I note the disk says ‘Asia Pacific Edition’ and the box has an Australia website address (.com.au), but the language choices are the normal English, French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil) for the Western Hemisphere….

It installed fine, and so far, operates beautifully. I’ve probably already put it through more than I did the copy of 8. Going to take a bit to get used to the interface, it has naturally changed some in six versions.