Fisker

I spoke too soon. I ran the program for a client this morning and at the end of the program I let it sit for a minute and then hit the escape key to exit P2E. This time it rebooted my computer! The particular piece of music I am using is especially well suited to my presentation. The music itself and the length of the piece is exactly what I want for the presentation so switching is not really an acceptable option. The music file runs without problems on my media applications (Winamp, Windows Media Player) so whatever is going on DOES seem to be unique to P2E. Also, it seems to me that if P2E is having problems with a corrupted mp3 file it ought to give you a warning or error message, not lock up or reboot your computer. In my book that is a MAJOR defect - and that's coming from someone who spent two years as VP for Client Support in a software company. This is a real killer problem for me. I can't afford to have P2E lock up and/or crash my computer. I often have multiple applications running so in some cases I may lose critical data. If I can't resolve this soon I am going to have to look for another application. I love the P2E transitions and I have put a lot of time into creating this presentation so I really don't want to switch but if I can't depend on P2E then I have no choice. Any recommendations on a possible alternatives?

I have re-run the problem file several times and my PC has not locked up. I also created a version with different music [for some reason it would not let me create a slide-only version!]. That version has not produced the problem. It's hard for me to know what is going on since the problem is intermittant. Out of curiosity has ANYONE had problems with locking up in XP? Why is P2E so music-sensitive?

I will give your suggestion a try, although since the problem is intermittant I may not know if it will recurr until I have run the new version several times. I have run the problem file on two other PCs but in both cases I only ran it once. I will try it on my wife's PC several times and see what happens. I am running 4.2. I was not even aware there was a 4.3 beta. It seems to me from all the posts that P2E is unusually susceptible to problems involving sound files. Since putting slide shows to music is likely to be a very common desire I hope that will be addressed in 4.3. Steve

The test presentation ran fine - no problems. I have only created one presentation at this point so I really can't answer the question about happening with "all" presentations. I have made several modifications to this one and it has frozen my PC in previous iterations as well. I have a Dell Dimension 8200 with a full gig of memory, two 80GB hard drives, and an NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti200 video card running at 1024x768 resolution. The sound card is a Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum eX. I run many applications on my PC. This is the only one that has caused this sort of total lock-up. The presentation includes 34 slides, all in jpg format. Sizes range from 38 to 1,033KB, which is well within the guidelines I have seen for P2E. Only six are in excess of 1,000KB. There is a single sound file, in mp3 format. What is most puzzling is the fact that more often than not the presentation runs fine. Steve

I am running P2E 4.2 in Win XP on a high end PC with 1GB RAM and lot's of HD space. Every now and then the PC will totally lock up while running a slide show presentation I have created. When the lock up occurs I hear a high-pitched electronic squeal and cannot even get out of it using Ctrl+Alt+Delete and cannot shut down the PC. I have to power off and start from scratch. It does not happen every time - perhaps about every third or forth time running the same slide show. It's very frustrating and I must either find a solution or find some other software. I like P2E but cannot accept this sort of behavior as it impact my clients. I have tried sending an email to support but am not getting a response. Can someone help me? Steve

Thanks, that's great.

Is there a way to easily insert a blank page in a project. I may want to create a title page, and ending page, or a spacer page that does not have a graphic on it. It would be a pain to have to create a JPG file just for this.

I have oval photos and photos torn into pieces that I want to put on a gradient background without the usual white background showing. I know JPEG does not support tranparent backgrounds but supposedly GIF does. I am using Photoshop CS as my primary graphics program. I have tried creating transparent backgrounds several times without success. Can anyone help me with this?