arena 3.0 sucks

I'm sick and tired of arena 3.0, it's so buggy I'm losing enthusiasm to study chess just because of that.

I've lost the count of how many times my screen froze (the whole windows), or how many times the engine froze, or how many times I had to restart the program, or how many times the pieces freeze in the middle of the board (and everything starts to bug out in a chain reaction).

Please does anyone have an alternative for this buggy program? (I mean another program)

Thank you so much if anyone can help.

http://www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=51528

http://scidvspc.sourceforge.net/index.html

http://scid.sourceforge.net/

http://www.triplehappy.com/

http://www.wmlsoftware.com/chesspad2.html

http://jose-chess.sourceforge.net/

http://www.shredderchess.com/

http://www.hiarcs.com/

also  http://chessx.sourceforge.net/ with recent builds at http://www.box.com/chessx

Lucas Chess should be up pretty high on the list:

http://lucaschess.host22.com/

Thanks, I'll check them out.

I face bug recently on that program.dont use it anymore but may be downgrading will work.you can look for earlier versions.

Most of the problems I had with Arena 3.0 where solved immediately after I changed the (stupidly chosen) default-setting in:

Engines=>Manage=>Options=>Engine process priority

from

"Normal priority"
to
"Lower than normal"

If you don't do that, the program will pretty much always show the symtoms as described in the first post as soon as you try moving the Arena-Window or dare to touch any other application.

Winboard is working divinely, thank you very much.

I have another question, when I put analysis mode in winboard, it shows only the top 1 move the engine is calculating. I'd like it to show not only the top one but at least the top 3 or 5, can I do that? I've seen people do this in internet, for example kingscrusher, but how to do it?

no doesnt work 

I haven't used Winboard in a long while (I use that sucky, buggy Arena GUI), but I think the Xboard user guide tells you how to do it. (Link on the same Winboard forum page as the download link.)