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Rant: Corel Paintshop Pro 6.
I upgraded from Jasc Paintshop Pro 9 moths ago, and - despite the usual Corel "bloat and bug fest" - it's been fairly smooth.
Until this stupid afternoon, when I'm trying to increase the transparency (I.e. reduce the opacity) of a bunch of layers together. Needless to say I have them grouped, as I want everything to affect them all the same. Can I find how to change the group opacity? Nope. I have to do each stupid layer one by one... 
Gawd, I remember why I used to hate Corel products now... 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I downloaded a freebie Corel was promoting a while back, tried it and well I was less than disappointed.
At the time I was debating whether to spend the money(exorbitant to say the least) for the last non-cloud version of Photoshop. I paid Adobe there extortion money!
New version: WinHeist Version 2.1.0
My goal in life is to have a psychiatric disorder named after me.
I'm currently unsupervised, I know it freaks me out too but the possibilities are endless.
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Photoshop is good...but...it's *HOW MUCH*? 
PSP is not as polished, but it does nearly everything PS does, it's not Adobe, and it's less than £50 instead of £1200...and that is a lot of beer tokens...
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I paid ~$600 for CS6 but for me it was like $1200! (not counting exchange rates)
A lot of the stuff I do in CS6 can be done in Gimp also and it's free! But there is just a lot that can't, that is specific to CS6 and I'm just used to doing it that way I guess.
New version: WinHeist Version 2.1.0
My goal in life is to have a psychiatric disorder named after me.
I'm currently unsupervised, I know it freaks me out too but the possibilities are endless.
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You REALLY need to look at paint.net[^] - it's free!
Written by a current Microsoft employee / developer.
Contrary to popular belief, nobody owes you anything.
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I use Paint.NET as well - excellent program, if a little lightweight (which is all I need usually).
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Quote: I upgraded downgraded from Jasc Paintshop Pro 9
FTFY
I found the old JASC version much, much easier to work with (and faster) than any of the recent COREL efforts.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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So did I...
It just didn't "play nice" with Aero on Win 7, so if I was trying to do screen captures for manuals I had to keep closing it, doing the capture, and restarting - which was a PITA. So I took advantage of an offer and went from JPSP9 to CPSP6.
It works...but...it's been Coreled. More bugs, worse UI, slower.
Still, for the money, it's better than GIMP and Photoshop.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I never noticed that Aero problem (probably as I didn't do screen captures) so it was fine until I downgraded to Corel! Now I use Paint.NET for most things - photo touch up, etc. It's not as good, although getting better with each release, but I don't do enough to be bothered to re-install PSP9!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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I tried Paint.NET, but I couldn't get on with it. It hated my pressure sensitive pen / graphics tablet and just wouldn't let me vary stroke width, colour, or opacity with it (which is very handy for "Blending" image edges together)
I went back to PSP9! 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Quote: I went back to PSP9!
I love a happy ending!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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OriginalGriff wrote: It just didn't "play nice" with Aero on Win 7
I have an old version of Fireworks (before it was Adobe) that I love, but it also has the same problem with Aero. It's old but it still works, and it paid for itself a long time ago!
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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+5
Even I could draw in PSP9.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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OriginalGriff wrote: this stupid afternoon
What did the afternoon do to you, huh!? I get that Corel is stupid, but leave that poor afternoon out of this...
And totally unrelated, this was the only Corel I could think of...[^]
I even got the music stuck in my head now 
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The lack of a feature isn't a bug.
At least you can count yourself lucky--if there was a way to introduce a bug in whatever you're trying to do, you can count on Corel to find it.
And then if there is no way, they will defy the odds.
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Yeah... I used to use "Corel Draw!" and "Photopaint" in the 90's. And one of their favourite tricks was to crash while saving. And while autosaving as well
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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There is one thing that will surely kill your PC. IO!! 
I have this issue that has gone on for years under Windows OS (XP and now 7) for a long time.
Here it is:
All of a sudden so much IO bombards the main disk that the entire OS is bound up.
If you do anything you only create more IO so you just sit and wait...and wait...
Anyone else suffer this kind of thing. I often attribute it to WEB BROWSERS!!!
Usually Chrome, but others seem to do it to. Like all of a sudden they decide to flush all their buffers to disk or something. IT is quite a terrible thing.
Anyone? Share my pain? 
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I haven't had this problem anymore since I got an SSD.
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harold aptroot wrote: I haven't had this problem anymore since I got an SSD.
Very good input. I should've mentioned that too, because I have one machine where I've applied that solution also and it worked. It's crazy to think that you have to install an SSD in a windows machine though. Isn't it?
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I installed a SSD for my system's drive and the Windows Performance Index on the machine went up from 5.6 to 7.2! Disk IO seems to be twice as fast.
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I agree 200%.
It is just interesting that we have all these quadcore processors and Terabytes of RAM and all, but stupid I/O is still binding us up. Where's the roughage!?! 
And there are (kind of) issues with SSDs and they're still more expensive -- though dropping rapidly. Is it lazy programming that the IO is getting killed?
My machine would hum along if not for this disk read/writes. If only we could write to photons.
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So...your system slows to a crawl when it's busy with the drive, and an SSD makes your system responsive again.
Sounds to me like the SSD is just hiding the problem rather than addressing it. What's really causing all this disk activity? Normally I'd suggest your system is low on RAM and it's gotta page things to disk, but if you have plenty of it, it's hard to make that assertion without knowing more.
You do blame Chrome, and it is known to be a pig, by all accounts (I don't use it myself, so I wouldn't know), but still, how much RAM exactly is it chewing when you see this increase in drive activity?
Time to spend some quality time with Performance Monitor / Resource Monitor.
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newton.saber wrote: It's crazy to think that you have to install an SSD in a windows machine though. Isn't it?
It's only crazy if you think you "have" to.
But why would it be "crazy"? Why do they exist, if not to increase performance?
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Typical example on how to fight the symptoms while not curing the root cause. But an elegant one 
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I'd be seriously REALLY interested if there is an explanation to that. I would even suffer to make a complete fool of myself if this belongs to the obvious-things-every-programmer-should-know and I, well, didn't know, but I'd be relieved to know the answer - provided there is only one.
Win8 comes with an enhanced Task manager, with the monitoring function (Remember the good ol' sysinternals?), and this helps a bit to nail it down to the browser, as you have pointed out. Other good candidates are the freaking 1Gb daily "Java" updates (OK, slightly exaggerated here, sometimes only 2Gb every other day).
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