kim

Dear All, I am a bit busy at the moment but will respond to the many posts in a couple of days. In the meantime, I will send you, Guru, as you requested in private, my .pte file directly. Each of the 442 slides of my show has two buttons on it, and a short text element. More later, Kim

Hello all, Regarding Jayspry's suggestion that 128MB RAM is not enough, I refer to the PTE faq that recommends 300MHz/32 MB RAM (and requires a minimum of 100MHz/16 MB). I would also like to point out that on a much faster system 1.7GHz, 512MB of RAM, the launch time was still 40 seconds for my exe. The FAQ also states that the maximum size of the exe that can be created is 2100MB and the maximum number of images is 32,000. I must assume that these are maximum *calculated* numbers and no presentation has even come close to testing these limits. In my opinion, P2E is stretched when the exe size increases and perhaps more realistic figures should be mentioned in the FAQ. An opinion that is buttressed by the fact that when I run P2E itself, it takes 25 seconds to come up because it is set to open up the "last project". My pte file is 1.05 MB. (I don't think the size of each slide is a factor in the time taken to open the project.) I appreciate the suggestions and discussion regarding the reduction in size of the images and hence of the exe. My images are each full-screen (they cover the whole screen at 4:3 ratio) of pixel size 2400 x 1600. Since I have bitmapped text on them (some of it rather small), I stuck to a fairly high JPEG compression ratio (6 or 7 or 8). I look forward to future improvements in P2E, specially a reduction in the launch time for large projects, and a more realistic assessment and presentation of its capabilities. - Kim

Al, Hmm, I may beg to differ. In my particular case, they are not customers. I am making available to them a collection of slides and would like them to view them in a manner that seems most appropriate (yes, to me). You know I did not even know that the nav-bar could be moved. I did it inadvertently and then had to click on its edges and drag it back. Some viewers may do the same and not have the savvy to move it back from the centre of the image. As I said, it would be good to have an *option* to lock it in place. After all, buttons are locked in place (aren't they?). - Kim

Al, Sorry for taking up real estate on the front page. In my experience with forums and newsgroups, I have found it beneficial to allocate a separate thread for every topic. Otherwise: 1) Some points tend to get overlooked and/or 2) The number of responses becomes so large as to make meaningful perusal of the messages difficult. That said, I take your point and will, in future, try to consolidate any points I would like to make into a smaller number of threads. I apologize once again to the denizens of this forum in case I've transgressed acceptable behaviour here. - Kim

Al, Should not the flexibility you mention also extend to providing the creator of the show with the *option* of locking the nav-bar in place? In my show where every bit of real estate is used by picture or text elements, the nav-bar has a specific location. This is true for all resolutions from 800 x 600 up. - Kim

Igor, Most of the info is there in my post with topic "Mega project: 380 MB (1)" but I provide it here again: Number of slides: 442 Size of each JPEG: 700KB to 1.1 MB 18 MP3 tracks of 51 minutes total duration played in random order in the background: 70 MB total. Size of exe file: 378 MB System: Celeron 800MHz RAM 128K OS: Win98se HD: 40GB Hope this helps. Do refer to the post I specify earlier wherein I note the unacceptable launch times for this exe file. I am glad that v.4 will address this problem. - Kim

Sixth observation: I would have appreciated an option to start the show with in "paused" mode so that the user can switch to auto run mode rather than the other way around. That's all folks, at least for the time being. - Kim

Fifth observation: Shouldn't there be an option to prevent the user from moving the navigation bar? - Kim

Fourth observation: While there is an option of preventing the user from wrapping around to the first slide from the last slide, there is no way of preventing him from wrapping back to the last slide from the first slide. If the user inadvertently hits left-arrow on the first slide, he ends up on the last slide. Not very professional. The option should encompass both wraparounds. It would be nice also, if in this case, the appropriate arrow is grayed out on the navigation bar. - Kim

Third observation: Specifying an icon for the exe file DOUBLES the compile time. In my case, the exe file compiles in 3 minutes. When I specify an icon, P2E still takes 3 minutes to count up to 100% but then it takes another three minutes before the hard disk activity ceases and the exe is finally created. - Kim

Second observation re. my mega project: I've observed that if I start next-screening very rapidly as soon as the first screen appears, I get the music stuttering problem reported by another user recently. I also get the same problem on some laptops when I run the presentation from the CD drive. (Something to do with power-conservation during CD-drive use on laptops?) If I page through the slides slowly (one a second or so), the problem does not arise. In any case, this problem is much reduced if I use the internal mp3 player. - Kim

Hello, I am a new member on the forum though I have been evaluating/using P2E for some time. I've recently created a large presentation using v.3.80 and would like to share my experience with you. The presentation: 442 slides 80 MB of mp3 files (18 files, total of 51 minutes) as background music in random-track order (no synchronization) Total exe size: 380 MB Each slide is a jpeg file of size 700 to 1100 KB and there is no way I can make it smaller (managing two versions of the each image will be a major headache). First observation: It launches very slowly. Off the hard disk, on a 800 MHz system, it takes 30 seconds *before* the "Loading" progress bar appears -- during which time there is no apparent activity. In fact, the apps name also does not appear during this interval in the Windows tasks-running window, neither does the Windows cursor change to an hourglass. After 30 seconds the "Loading" progress bar appears and it takes *another* 30 seconds before the slide show starts. I got around this problem by creating a program (basically a stay-on-top splash screen) in Delphi that launches the p2e exe file and remains on the screen until the slide show starts. I had to make some api calls to determine when the p2e exe window is open. (My program also prevents autorun.inf from running twice -- something that can otherwise happen under certain circumstances on Win98 systems.) This problem needs to be addressed and I am glad that v.4 promises an improvement. Note that I only used P2E to compile the presentation. I used text editors and filter programs that I wrote to manipulate the .pte file directly. Other observations I have, I will post as different topics on the forum. - Kim