Basecamp horribly unreliable, Garmin have you no pride?

I've used BaseCamp for many years and only rarely seen a crash. I suspect the issue is with your PC and not BC.

What OS is installed? Is it up to date?

I've used BaseCamp for many years and only rarely seen a crash. I suspect the issue is with your PC and not BC.

What OS is installed? Is it up to date?

I am running Win 7, with all the latest updates installed. The system runs in a protected environment, malware is likely not an issue. Mapsource runs without incident as does everything elses on my system. The behavior is unique to Basecamp.

As a educator and software developer with over 40 years experience, software crashes are RARELY the fault of the "PC". This could be a bug in a shared library, but that is very unlikely. Well written software should never just crash if there is a condition on a PC that creates a problem for the software. Well written software should test for that condition and produce an appropriate user-friendly warning ("Not enough memory", "Required file 'xyz' not found", etc). It should never crash.

"That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers." (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Oath of Fealty).

I have run BC on 4 different computers over several years (since it was first released). The computers have/had Windows 7 and 10 installed on them. I can not say for sure I never had BC crash on me, but it was not often enough to remember it.

Running Windows 7 / BaseCamp reliably

Also running Basecamp on two Windows 7 64 bit machines and it is very reliable..

One of the issues that BaseCamp worked on to fix in a prior release was the management of the Microsoft Net platform that it is dependent upon. Microsoft had made changes at the same time in the way they were managing Microsoft.Net distribution, and applications using that base also needed to change their management of their software dependencies for best practices..

Microsoft Net, and other runtime platforms have historically been one of the more poorly managed components from Microsoft.. Applications being dependent upon specific vintages of the platform due to incompatibilities across platform vintages ends up requiring multiple levels of a platform code having to be resident on the machine..

For example take a look at how many different vintages of Microsoft Visual C ++ redistributable might be sitting on your machine right now..

Since every machine evolves uniquely in terms of redistributed code bases over its life, driven by what applications need, I would guess your problems might be in this neck of the woods.

What do the crash logs indicate?

update

I have been using Mapsource for years but decided to download basecamp yesterday since it is the currently "supported" product. In the 24-hours I have used it, it has crashed under different circumstances about 5 times.

...

(The latest is whenever I try to print the daily schedule for a trip, the program crashes upon pressing the print menu option. Happens everytime, although earlier it seemed to work. And speaking of features, in addition to sending the bug report I sent an email to garmin in which I wanted to inclue the bug report details. But evidently garmin has not implemented copy/paste for extracting that info out of their bug report.)

I have identified the exact conditions that causes this particular crash in the software. I contacted garmin support when the issue first occurred, we will see if as a result of this post or as a result of that contact, Garmin recognizes and acts on the fact that the nature of this interaction has changed. I am no longer need to GET help FROM Garmin on this usse; I can GIVE help TO garmin on how to eliminate a bug from their product. I will followup with how Garmin responds.

I currently have BC installed on two desktops, a laptop and a netbook with Win7, Win8 and recently updated one machine to Win10. I consider myself a heavy user planning detailed motorcycle routes for myself and a couple riding groups I'm involved with. I have never experienced a single crash while using BC.

Update

I am not sure what happened but a reply today appears not have gotten lost.

Of the most persistent problem, I have identified the problem and it is definitely a bug. Whether the same bus caused the other problems, time will tell.

I will wait to hear from Garmin. I hope Garmin recognizes and acts on the fact that the situation has changed. This is no longer a case of a customer GETTING help FROM Garmin. It is now a customer can GIVE help TO Garmin (precisely identify a condition that causes their program to crash). I will post a followup after I hear from Garmin.

Seems you're the only one experiencing crashing, it'll be interesting to hear the eventual outcome.

I am not sure what happened but a reply today appears not have gotten lost.

Of the most persistent problem, I have identified the problem and it is definitely a bug. Whether the same bus caused the other problems, time will tell.

I will wait to hear from Garmin. I hope Garmin recognizes and acts on the fact that the situation has changed. This is no longer a case of a customer GETTING help FROM Garmin. It is now a customer can GIVE help TO Garmin (precisely identify a condition that causes their program to crash). I will post a followup after I hear from Garmin.

How about posting your condition so some of us can try it on our on systems.
I certainly have issues at times with BC but I've been using it for several years on XP (32), Win7 (32/64) and all previews/releases of Win 10 (32/64) and crashes are not a big problem here.

Good News !!!

In response to the information I sent, I got a reply from Garmin I was not pleased with. The author of that reply took the attitude of "its your (or your systems fault), even though the evidence provided was contrary to what he was saying. It struck me as a "lazy" response to the problem.

So I followed up as instructed in them email with a call and the good news is had a wonderfully responsive conversation with the agent I spoke with. It was the exact reaction one would hope to get from a customer support agent, kudos to garmin on that interaction.

So the problem that appears repeatable has to do with using the TripPlanner feature. I got the impression that this feature is either new or perhaps was recently "enhanced". As I indicated before, I was using Mapsource previously and Basecamp's TripPlanner is perhaps the most significant value-added feature I get from changing. So it is where I started and may explain the difference in reliablitiy I encountered compared to you all, if you all are not using it or not using it recently.

Within TripPlanner, there are a number of standard "Acitivity Profile" (Driving, Walking, Direct, etc) that determine the time it takes to traverse between any two waypoints. One can also create custom Activity profiles. I created a custom profile to deal with driving in an area where speeds would be much slower than normal. It appears Basecamp has a bug when one has a schedule for a day where one uses a standard Activity Profiles for the traversal between two waypoints and uses a custom profile for traversals between other pairs of waypoints. When one attempts to print the daily schedule, basecamp crashes. Use all custom APs or all standard APs, no crash.

An interesting question is why has this problem not been identified previously. Some possible explanations.
1. Mixing custom and standard APs is not something hardly anybody does.
2. Mixing APs is infrequent but those that have had problems have not reported it (or just accepted explanations like "the problem is with your printer setup" instead of being persistent).
3. This is a new bug created by a recent update to basecamp.
4. there is something completely different going on that what it appears.
5. ???