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Hi Brian, Yes, the dialog box is headed 'Windows Malicious Software tool' followed by the date, in my case February 2009, so one should watch for that and update if in doubt. The location is Windows\system32 and the filename is mrt.exe. Regards, Colin

Ronnie, You can run the tool of you have it by going to Start/Run and entering 'mrt'. If it doesn't run, you don't have it. Colin

I believe the Windows Vista DMI functions that annoy and upset so many people are DVD-centric, i.e. they expect pirated and other illegal program content to be on a DVD. The same program from a memory stick does not trigger the DMI checks as does a DVD. With the advent of 8GB and greater memory sticks, a DVD will fit on one, which probably wasn't the case when Vista was on the drawing board. Colin.

My pleasure, Tony. There are some real gems among free programs if you can find them. Imgburn is one. Regards, Colin

Ha. I went to one of those dome theaters once, where the image was projected right around the entire dome, and up to the apex. Damn film was about a motor-bike chase through narrow streets somewhere in Europe. The effect of the surround image was totally overwhelming - just a few minutes of that and I was outside losing my expensive lunch!! Groans, Colin

I fear you have the wrong program, Tony. Imgburn does allow DVD burning, even Blu-ray burning. Double-check you didn't accidentally get one of the 'parasite' (my word) programs that lurk on the Imgburn website. I have less than an hour ago burnt an ISO file to a DVD with Imgburn, no problem. The Imgburn screen is shown below. Does yours look the same? Colin

Please tell me you are not intending to P/Z or R every slide? I viewed a show recently from this forum, where every slide panned one way or another, and I was feeling motion-sick after seeing it twice! Colin

Tony, Xaver's suggestion to use VB to make an ISO image is a good one. I do this with the videos I make, and I save the ISO files in a folder called, oddly enough, 'ISO_Files'. Having the ISO files is very handy if you ever want to burn another copy of the show, as it obviates the necessity to recompile the show in VideoBuilder. I should think, if you are doing wedding videos, that burning multiple copies of the show would be much easier from an ISO than a rebuild, or even copying a DVD. Further, you can run an ISO file with Media Player to check it out before you commit to burning a disk, thus potentially saving time and a disk if the show is not right. If you go with this suggestion, a burner program called Imgburn is fast and efficient, and free. http://www.imgburn.com/ There are other programs with big 'download now' buttons on the same page, make sure you d/l Imgburn, about 1.9 MB. Colin

Hello Brian, Aaahh, no, it didn't slip my memory. If you read my post again, it says "Unless you burned it with an autoplay option you will have to start the program as you would any other, by usng the 'My Computer' icon on the desktop, navigating to the CD, and double-clicking the program." I guess that people used to self-starting commercial CDs might expect a PTE CD to autorun, and be flummoxed when it doesn't. It's all a learning curve, and sometimes you need the mental equivalent of crampons to make the grade Regards, Colin

What equipment did they attempt to watch it with? an executable file burnt to a CD will only play on a computer, and not on a DVD player. PTE does not require the PTE program to play an executable file. The executable is a complete stand-alone program that will run entirely by itself. Try playing the CD in your own computer. Unless you burned it with an autoplay option you will have to start the program as you would any other, by usng the 'My Computer' icon on the desktop, navigating to the CD, and double-clicking the program. If you really want the program to play on a DVD player then you have to have the De Luxe version of PTE to create the DVD (not a CD). Colin

Hello Lin, Our best wishes also from far-flung New Zealand. We may be apart physically, but comrade-wise we are together. I pray your wife's problems are able to be overcome. Best regards. Colin

Curiosity got the better of me, and I downloaded and ran your show. The pans were absolutely smooth all the way through two runs of the show, with no sign whatsoever of skip or jerkiness - but I concur with Yachtsman that you could make your audience motion-sick! Twice through and I was feeling a touch queasy! My computer is a Dell 1520 laptop, Intel Centrino duo-core 1.8 GHz CPU, nVidia 8600M-GT GPU with 256MB vram, a 1680 x 1050 display, and 3 GB of memory. I am of the mind that one needs something like the 8-series nVidia GPUs for good results with this amount of panning. Photography is excellent also, I would think a dslr was used for the shots. Colin

Hello Ed et al, I have just tried out your problem here, XP SP3, Dell laptop. Started PTE, went into the O&A screen, hit the printscreen key - no shift key, opened CS2 and set a new image, hit ctrl+V, and there she was, as per below. Copy screen to clipboard is a basic Windows function, independent of any running software, except programs specifically coded to lock out the function, and I do not believe that Igor has done this to PTE. Actually, I find that the Windows clipboard with its ability to hold only one image at a time is rather primitive. When doing multiple screen captures, as I think Ed is doing for his presentation, I have taken to using Bulent's Screen recorder ver 1.5, a free version, which has a programmable capture key - I use 'f' as my key - and you can capture screens as fast as you can press the key. It even makes a nikon-like shutter sound as it makes the capture! With a running show, for instance, you can easliy capture each image as it appears on the screen. The images are written as .bmp files to a nominated folder. Bulents will capture screens that are ostensibly locked out by software, a handy feature at times. Here's the link for Bulent's: http://johnbokma.com/software-recommendati...enrecorder.html Cheers, Colin

A somewhat lateral solution to your problem lies in the name you give to your new slides. Since Windows always sorts files in alphabetical order, if you precede the filename with a dash(-) it will sort before all other slides, so it will be at the top of the file list; if you use an underscore(_) it will sort last, and be at the bottom of the list. If you create 5 images using a dash, those five will be at the top of the list, ordered by the next character in the name. Colin.

I don't frequent that site, but I tried it just now, and was in within 8 seconds, no problem. Colin

Just to throw my tuppence worth into the ring. I tried running with autoscroll 2 in both 5.5 and 5.6 on a couple of shows of mine, on a Dell laptop with a duo core 1.8 GHz Centrino cpu, 3 GB ram, a 1680 x 1050 pixel screen, and an nVidia 8600M-GT gpu with 256 MB on board. The blue pointer moved very smoothly to the centre of the timeline at 27.5 seconds (half of the 55 seconds of timeline visible). At that point the blue pointer became stationary, and the timeline began moving left. At no time did the timeline move absolutely smoothly, it moved in 'mini-jitter' fashion, but I didn't see any actual pauses, or stops, in its movement, and I couldn't see any difference between 5.5 and 5.6. My thinking is that the gpu has to manufacture the timeline display continuously ( a much more processor-intensive task than moving the blue pointer), but secondary to the priority given to PZR and transition effects being applied to the slides, so that at peak gpu usage, the timeline would be ignored in favor of the picture until the gpu got its breath back, so to speak. This is supported by reports of better performance when the mini screen is reduced in size, relieving some of the load on the gpu, and allowing more processor time for the timeline. If I'm right, nothing can be done about it, except to use a quicker gpu. Colin

Ha!! That will be the answer. Here is a quote from a Canon projector specification for their Xeed 6 model [http://www.letsgodigital.org/en/news/articles/story_6504.html] "Frame Lock ensures correct synchronisation between computer and projector when presenting animated slide shows, eliminating interference and horizontal banding". Perusal of Google searching on 'projector "frame lock" ' shows that quite a number of projectors have Frame Lock in their specification - but some do not mention it, including the SX-50 and SX-60 The SX-50 write-up says that machine is designed for high quality graphic and photographic images, and not home theatre, which I take to mean moving images. Perhaps that is why there appears to be no Frame Lock mentioned in the specs - but of course it may be available on the projector menu. We need Ed to verify that. Colin

Ed, Well, that is interesting, and supports the variable refresh rate theory. In my post suggesting you try an S-vid cable, the intention was to check for wipe/jitter problems only as a diagnostic approach, and I said that the vid quality would be poor - in fact reduced to the TV standard, about 720 x 576 pixels, so there is nothing you can do about that. However, you have proved the point that svga or xga analog output makes the projector unhappy. It looks like the projector manufacturers will have to modify their firmware if they want to solve this problem. The question is, will they? A somewhat more radical approach would be to see if Igor can somehow control the refresh rate of PTE to match the projector requirements. Colin

Hello Brian, Well, no, ZA doesn't work like your illustration of Norton. You have to actually close down the program, and it asks if you really want to do it, and warns that you are unprotected, and then XP leaps up and says you're unprotected - none of them check to see if the computer is off-line - somewhat of a pain in the nether regions. Then you have to launch ZA again when you want to restart. There's no way out for me, I would be paranoid about being on-line without ZA Pro running. I think the problem with slow loading is that ZA figures a checksum every time you open an executable file - thorough but slow. I dunno about ship's engineer's language, electronic tech language would run it close at times! Kind regards, Colin

Well, that's a bit of a theatrical response there, Philly! When you've done with the sword-wielding, chest-beating, and righteous epithets, don't forget that basically those programs are your friend in ordinary usage. Seriously, I would like to see these programs and their ilk fitted with a 'suspend' switch so that where unfettered performance is required they can be turned off for the duration, when disconnected from the net of course. As it is, I go through the rigmarole of killing ZA for several operations, like running a PTE exe file, and burning CDs and DVDs - an intervention from ZA or an anti-v program is a sure way to wreck a burn. a 'suspend' option would be very nice to have. Colin

I have had a similar problem when attempting to run a another member's show at camera club - my computer just hung and hung, where the club machine - a lower-powered model than mine - ran the show almost immediately - chagrin!! I found the reason was my machine has ZoneAlarm installed, and it was that program attempting to check the largish show program that was the culprit. Killing ZA enabled my computer to run the show more or less instantly. I have since found that anti-virus programs that do real-time checking of programs will cause this delayed response with every program that is launched. Colin

Well, the towel's in the ring now, having been thrown there by Ed, but I have one other idea which doesn't seem to have been explored. I touched on it some posts back when I asked if a composite video ( S-video) connection to the projector had been tried, and I haven't seen the outcome of any trial to that end. Now, I may be up a gum tree here, but looking at video cards from a gaming point of view, one measure the gamers use is frame repetition (refresh) rates, and how many refreshes per second a particular card delivers with various games; some games are extremely heavy users of the gpu, and the refresh rate slows unacceptably. This indicates to me, at least on the surface, that the amount of data crunching required for a game, or in our case PZR, will affect the refresh rate. If so, then expecting a projector to cope with a constantly varying refresh rate throughout a show (fast with static images, slower with PZR effects) is maybe asking too much of the projector. Perhaps Igor could give us some idea of how refresh rates behave with varying PZR demands on the gpu. I might try to use some of the gamers' test programs on PTE shows and see what happens. Colin

Roger that, Jim. Post removed and put into current thread, thanks. Colin

Ed, I wonder if timebase differences could be a factor, e.g. the frame repetition rate from the computer is different to the frame rate of the projector. A way to test this would be to use a composite video cable to feed the projector. I think using composite video would produce the computer output at TV frequencies which should be fully accepted by the projector. The video will be lousy at TV definition, but it might give you a pointer as to what's going on. That's of course if your laptop has a CV outlet -a small circular socket. My Dell lappy has this. Colin

Hello Pattie, Sometimes renaming a file in Windows adds the new extension to the filename instead of replacing the existing extension, e.g. if you attempt to rename 'pte.key' to 'pte.reg', you can get a file called 'pte.key.reg' which of course will not work. How did you go about renaming the file? BTW, it's not very well known, but a registry file inserts the data portion directly into the registry, and the easiest way is to use the .reg extension, then run the file as if it were a program. The data will be added into the registry from any folder the file is in; there's no need to copy it into the PTE folder. Once the key is in the registry, PTE will find it, and so will all future versions of PTE This is not so with Videobuilder, you will need a new key for that every two years, as I understand it. Colin