It would seem that my pirated software dilemma was fairly short lived. Corel is now offering a "no questions asked" option to buy a legitimate version of Draw X4 for $99 if you can show a sales receipt or $199 for those who cannot. Unfortunately however, I'm a cheap bastard.
I downloaded and tried out GIMP for a few hours, but it's just not as user friendly as I'd like. Not unlike Photoshop, performing even the simplest of functions such as stoking a line requires you to do two or three extra steps compared to Corel's software. Zooming in and out....yeah, gotta go into a seperate window for that whereas Corel's allows your use a mouse's scroll wheel irregardless of what tool your using. I did like it's fairly simplified layering, but it's something that I rarely (almost never) use. GIMP met the trashcan a few hours ago.
Being the cheap-ass that I am, I was originally gonna seek out some sort of "less-than-legal" means of getting X4 to work. Instead I found a whole myriad of sites devoted to creating patches that allow legacy 32-bit software to run on Windows 7 64-bit platforms...and now I'm back in the old school, Corel Draw 8 (circa 1997).
Hallelujah, it's a miracle. Somebody call Jebus and thank him for me. Call collect....
Glad you found a working software1 ^_^
ReplyDeleteThere is a fix for it... Do you have it?? Or Want it???
ReplyDeleteFix-wise, it's not so much a patch as just a simple compatibility setting within Win. Click start, programs, right click the program, properties, compatibility tab, check the compatibility box and then select the OS the program was designed for...in my case it was Win NT 4.0 or 5.0...then click Apply. This will work for both Win7 and XP.
ReplyDeleteFor those who are wary of malware, etc MS has several fixes that will let Win7 run in XP mode:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx
It reqires you to install three programs, the first one being 500MB....ouch!