Brickley's
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With the release of the new Hobby Train set 10183, came the news “LDD version 2.0 required to view or download the online building instructions.”

Great! A new version of LDD! And it boasts some great new features! And lots of people who’d downloaded it before I was able to had said it’s a big improvement over previous releases. So I went to the download site in great anticipation.

I downloaded the new version, installed it (after first un-installing the previous version), and clicked the icon. Nice little loading screen, then WHAMMO! – “LDD has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience”. Ouch.

What can it possibly be? I figure maybe video, and mine is set to 32 bit, so I reduce it to 16 bit, and try again. Loading screen… Then a nice screen asking whether I want to try a starter model, or create my own. Excellent, seems like that fixed it! Means I have to use 16 bit colour, but I can live with that. So I click on a starter model that looks like a helicopter. Nothing. And I can’t switch back to my other programs. Uh oh, looks like another CPU hog, so I open task manager (takes probably 30 secs to open) and confirm yes, LDD is using 100% of my CPU. So I shut it down, takes a few mins to shut down. I try again just to confirm consistent behaviour, and yes it behaves the same. But this time when I shut it down, it also crashes my Firefox browser. Hmmm. Not looking good.

I sleep on it, and next day I try again. I tried many things, including

• Updating my video driver
• System restore to before the installation, then re-install
• Running spybot, adaware, regclean, etc, etc
• A zillion un-installs, re-installs, and reboots

But no go. And worst thing is, both Firefox and Thunderbird are now behaving weirdly, intermittently crashing, sometimes not loading at all. While that may be a result of all the screwing around I did to try to get LDD 2 going, I still consider LDD 2 the cause, and that does not make me happy. So, while the majority of people seem to be having no problem using the new version, and many have praised it’s new features, I find myself once again unable to use it (I had trouble running the original LDD on my old PC). As of today, LDD 2 has been uninstalled, and I will be unable to view the online instructions for the great new set, unless someone translates them to a format I can use. Adobe Reader still works. Hint, hint.

System specs:

• Intel Celeron 2.5GHz
• 1GB RAM
• SiS 661FX on-board video with 64M RAM at 1024×768, 32 bit
• Win XP SP2

Conclusion: Sounds like it’s a big improvement over previous versions, but unfortunately I will be unable to review it in any more detail. Maybe I should just buy a Mac.

Edit: After another round of regclean etc and a few reboots Firefox and Thunderbird at least seem to be back to normal.

Edit: After reading this post at Lugnet, I tried LDD 2.0 again, and it now works. So if you are experiencing a similar problem, please try downloading the latest version of Quicktime. Watch this space for a further review of LDD 2.0

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 7:13 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.