Internal Error

[gazumped 11,652]

OK - sanity check required please folks.  Been having a weird day after I mistakenly clicked the 'upgrade to 8.1' button on my laptop.  (I've been trying to ignore it for weeks).  Turns out once you've clicked it there's no retry/ cancel option - Win 8.1 was delivered to my laptop.  And so far I can't tell much difference from Windows 8.0.  

 

Except for one minor thing - my Evernote now crashes like a felled tree every time I start it.  Either I get a complete freeze,  or the 'Fatal Error,  send us an error report' pop-up.

 

Being a fully qualified techy person I went through the options I could think of - my lappy's memory and HD check out;  the disk isn't full,  I'm not virussed with anything.  So I clean reinstalled Evernote.  Same crashing.  

 

So I Revo uninstalled Evernote,  backed up and killed the database,  and reinstalled from a new Evernote.com download.  And I still have the same problem.  

 

A minute or two into operations everything freezes and Evernote shows as a process occupying 30+MB of memory but not doing anything;  or I get the Fatal Error pop-up and everything falls apart.  I did get two logs which I'll forward on to the tech guys.

 

I'm putting this here first because it's useful background for my support request - I'll add the ticket number when I get one.

 

Windows 8.1 / Evernote 5.6.4.4632 / Headache in all the wrong places..

 

EDIT:  OK:  My Title should obviously be 'Fatal Error' but I can't seem to change that - and my ticket is #725547 if anyone can take a look..

 

I don't think it's possible to send more than one file via the ticket,  and I had to change the *.log file to .log.txt to get that to go through - I've also got an error log file to send on.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Gaz, since it was the upgrade to Win8.1 that caused your problem, I'd downgrade to 8.0.

Don't know exactly how to do this, but I'm sure a google would probably give you some guidance.

 

Also, you might be able to uninstall the 8.1 upgrade in Windows Update, but I really don't know since I haven't used Windows for several years now, and have never use Win8.  In prior versions of Windows you could do this.

 

Also, in prior versions of Windows, you could set an available update to IGNORE in Windows Update, so it wouldn't bother you anymore.  Still available if you need it, just no more nags.  

 

Good luck.

[gazumped 11,652]

Cheers - I'll look into it;  Windows takes great pleasure in advising you (after you clicked the button) that the change to 8.1 is irreversible,  and I'm sure I read some stuff about taking an up to date backup before you upgrade so it's possible to restore 8.0 if necessary.  But 8.1 is the Way Forward according to MS central,  and future updates will depend on devices having the 8.1 files on board.  I hate computers.  

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Gaz, do a google on "uninstall windows 8.1 update"

 

You'll see that the original 8.1 update was a disaster, and MS pulled it.

One article said:

 

 

According to Microsoft, "If you have upgraded from Windows 8 Pro with Media Center to Windows 8.1 Pro with Media Center, you might be able to restore it back to Windows 8 by refreshing your PC."

 

But I think this means that you will have to reinstall all your apps.

 

I've heard nothing good about Win8, and a lot bad.

If it comes to a reinstall of Win8, you could downgrade to Win7 -- IMO, the best version of Windows ever released by MS.

 

I've never seen a compelling reason to upgrade to Win8.

 

IAC, I wish you luck.

 

BTW, you could do a chat with Evernote to see if there are any known issues with Win8.1.

[gazumped 11,652]

OK - update:  problem FIXED!!  Bad news - I'm not sure how I did that...

 

Brief recap - I have two laptops,  one running W8.0,  the other 8.1 (not exactly my choice).  Evernote runs smoothly(ish) on 8.0,  gave me Fatal Errors on 8.1,  although before the laptop was "upgraded" it had run Evernote without problems.  My EXB file had been zapped in a separate issue,  so I was looking to reload a rather large database...

 

So.  I uninstalled and reinstalled Evernote;  uninstalled and reinstalled with Extreme Prejudice (ie Revo) and played around with registry cleaners,  a tip about refreshing IE11,  and even tried copying the database folder from the good machine to the bad one.  Nothing worked.  Still a Fatal Error every couple of minutes.

 

I started from scratch and Revo'd the installation again,  restarted the laptop,  ran a system cleaner and started again - and then reinstalled.  Then I screenshot and copied the error logs each time I received an error.  I bundled that lot off to Support under my ticket number so they could engage in some high-level head-scratching.

 

While waiting for the outcome I played with transferring the database files across again - I'd zipped everything the first time to speed up the transfer,  but this time I just copied the files to an external hard drive and copied them 'as is' - it actually seemed faster that way too!

 

I restarted Evernote,  and my goodness it now works!  I've run it for some hours and checked that clips and updates on the other machine do sync across,  so it seems 100% again!

 

Which all goes to prove I guess,  that even if you already tried the boring backup / uninstall / reinstall / restore business several times,  do it again.  Patience and persistence is definitely a plus when it comes to resolving faults.  (Oh - and being a genius tech-guru of course )

 

The two things I know I did differently this time around - I installed Evernote 'as an Administrator';  and I didn't zip the folder content when copying the database files across.

 

Evernote seems to have some problems when trying to download a large database,  but based on my experience I would very strongly recommend having a local backup copy from which you can restore your notes should your need to rebuild the database at any stage.  Backups of course are a good idea anyway!

 

I've reported this all back to Support too - if they have anything more to offer after analysing the logs I sent,  I'll let you know.