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I don't think it is the projector. All the projector knows is a stream of data from the video card, and it can't tell the difference between program data and desktop data. Either your laptop or the PTE program is causing the external video port to be turned off at the end of the program. Try running a diferent program, say a word processor through the projector, and see if terminating that program causes the loss of the video port. If it does the same, then it's your laptop; if not, then it looks like some setting in PTE is the problem, but it isn't normal for PTE to do that. On my Dell laptop, the end of a show reverts to the projector simply showing the desktop, but no loss of the data connection happens. What video card do you have in the laptop? That might be a clue. Colin

Can you provide some more information on what you want to do, and where you are having trouble? Your query is a little too broad to answer at this stage. Colin

A good choice. I have the same machine, a Dell 1520, with a 1.8 GHz dual core CPU and an Nvidia 8600M GT GPU, 3 GHz ram, and the 1680*1050 screen. I ordered mine from Dell about 5 months ago, and I had the choice of Vista, or XP Home or Professional, and I went with XP Pro. No way was I going to have Vista, with its reported incompatibilities, not only with PTE but numbers of other programs as well. If your machine is still under warranty, you could ask Dell about replacing the OS with XP, which is still readily available and is frequently offered as an alternative when buying new machines. The fallback position would be to buy a copy of XP and install it yourself - or get it installed - but the downside is it would have to be a clean install, i.e. erase the entire drive first, install XP and then load all your programs. Tedious, but probably worth it for the improved reliability. Regards, Colin no. 2 PS: I am totally satisfied with my 1520, an all-round great machine.

Hello Peter, Well, I got your system working well, with great results, but then I ran into a problem with all the different sizes and shapes of images I had gathered, and since it wasn't practical to regularize the sizes, I was faced with making a frame for almost every image, a long job. So, I made a 1024 x 768 textured 'matte board' and saved it without putting any transparent holes in it. Then I loaded each image in turn into Photoshop and put a border around the image with Select\Modify\Border, at a width of 5 pixels and feathered at 1 pixel. I then dragged the image as a second layer onto the 'matte board', adjusted the positioning, and flattened the layers. The result looked practically identical to your method, and it had the advantage of allowing any size image to be placed on the one matte. After one image was finished, I stepped the matte board history back to get a clear board, and then proceeded with the next image. I finished about 45 images in around three hours, about four minutes per image which I thought was not too bad. Of course, I can't zoom the images within the frame this way, but in this case it isn't a problem. Later, with images I will be taking myself, of uniform size, I will use your method, and figure out how to zoom within the frame. Thanks again for your valuable assistance, Kind regards, Colin

Marvellous!! Many thanks to all of you who replied so promptly to my request. I am humbled by your collective willingness to share your knowledge in such a manner on this forum. I am doing two genealogical shows for family reunions, one for my wife's family and one for my family, both about ancestors who emigrated to New Zealand 100 and 150 years ago respectively. As you can imagine, the image resources for these shows are garnered from old photographs, books and articles of their home areas in England, various internet searches for information, and so on. I concluded that I really needed a framed show to accommodate the widely disparate images in order to unify the presentation as much as possible. Thank you all. Kind regards, Colin.

Hello Peter, Congratulations on a very polished show, from the original photography through to the presentation. I am very taken with your use of a frame around the images, and I have posted a request for information on how to use these frames on the general PTE forum, but I wonder if it is too cheeky to ask how one goes about doing a show using frames such as you have done? Regards, Colin

I am very interested in doing a show using a frame around each image as in the show "Whitby Abbey". The frame looks just like a matte board over the image, and various sized images can be accommodated within a standardised frame size. I haven't the faintest idea where to start doing this; I have searched through Lin and Jeff's tutorial, and other tut's, but can find no reference to how to do it. Any help gratefully accepted. Colin

Probably true. However, if I had a bootleg copy of a program like Photoshop, renowned for phoning home, and I saw my traffic indicator saying there was outgoing traffic, I would be rather worried that it was potting me. But, even pirate copies don't negate the general argument of horses for courses, and video is not (yet) a course for PTE. Personally, if it takes some sort of compromise on quality to allow PTE to accept video, I would oppose it. Given the - I'll come right out and say it - crappy images from video, Proshow is more than adequate for that purpose. Cheers, Colin

I am rather concerned at the current - and developing - line of thought which constantly wants otherwise excellent programs to extend their capability further and further, in this case pushing for PTE to allow embedded video clips, despite PTE's technology using the GPU to render excellent images making it unsuitable for including far inferior quality video images. Who complains that Photoshop, for instance, is not useful as a word processor; or that MS Office does a lousy job of photo editing; or that Irfanview cannot show layers? Why then the clamour for PTE to do something it wasn't designed for? If Igor at some future stage does incorporate video capability into PTE, that will be fine - but until then, accept PTE for what it is, a high quality still image slide show program with fantastic flexibility, able to produce breath-taking effects way beyond the basic still images from which the show is constructed. Any number of these mind-blowing shows can be had from Beechbrook for the downloading. Wanting vid clip capability is to ignore the riches already in PTE. Colin

I'm not sure I like the sarcasm in your post, with the implication that PTE is somehow old-fashioned, to be aligned with silent movies, 8mm film, and Bill Gate's remark of 25 years ago. PTE is an advanced slide show program. It produces the best quality slide show images available. Other show programs exist which allow video clips, like Proshow. If you want vid clips, nobody is stopping you from using Proshow. It's an easy bandwagon to climb onto; take an excellent program and berate it because it doesn't do what it wasn't designed for. Colin

Imgburn (http://www.imgburn.com/) is a free image burning program, a very versatile and stable program. Quote : "ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit!" Note: The Express Burn Advert is NOT ImgBurn. Get ImgBurn from the Download button at the top left of the page, just under the ImgBurn logo. Colin

(Said in response to another poster who preferred watching at 1024*768) 1280*1024 is a ratio of 1.25:1, or 5:4, while 1024*768 is a ratio of 1.33:1, or 4:3, so BBd's preference for the former is actually the squarer of the two. BBd also says elsewhere in this thread that he prefers to match the format of his shows with that of his camera, implying therefore his camera is also 5:4. Have I missed something? Colin

Hello Xaver, Of course, a general rule will have times when it will not fit a particular case, such as yours with Igor, but I think most newcomers would be looking for advice about using PTE, and a private message at such an early stage would be somewhat presumptive - unless of course a more experienced member invites the private contact. Kind regards, Colin (New Zealand)

Yes, a restriction on being able to send personal messages is a very good idea. Personally, I think 10 would be the minimum. I'd go for about 25, myself. My reasoning is that a newcomer should ask their questions on the forum, and only use personal messaging when they have gotten to know who's who in the forum. I don't think that can be achieved in only 5 or 10 posts, and in fact I would regard it as cheeky if a new member posted to me personally without having canvassed opinion from the general forum inhabitants. Also, it would take about that many posts for me to be able to assess the calibre of the newcomer before I engaged in a personal exchange. YMMV, Colin

Oh dear! and here I was thinking she(?) likes my handsome avatar!! It does look like a phishing trip. Is there no end to what these types will dream up?? It shouldn't need repeating, but: do not reply to this message, or others of this type. Colin

There are two ways to copy music from CDs. One is to use software like WMP to rip the CD, which also will include any copy protection inherent in the tracks. The other way is to simply play the music through the computer and use a sound editing program to copy the music as it plays. The second way leaves behind all copy protection, as you are simply copying the music as it plays. I don't know if Audacity is capable of doing this, but Goldwave, a professional sound editing program will do it. Goldwave is free to download, and free to use for a limited number of commands per session, about 800 I think. I edited and strung together 14 tracks, adjusting sound levels and pitch, and only used about 350 commands, so 800 is pretty generous. If you want to buy it it's not expensive, about $45 US. I found it so good I bought it without hesitation. It's worth a look at: http://www.goldwave.com/ Colin

Well said!! Colin

Go to Project Options/Advanced, check 'Time-limited usage' , then click 'Customize trial use details'. There, you can set an expiry date, expire after (number) of runs, or expire after (so many) days. Very flexible. Colin

Yes. Much egg on face. My initial tests were with 5 MB compressed jpegs of 25 MB full size images, a mistake I made when you said you were using 25 MB images, as I didn't realize you meant 25 MB compressed - 150 MB full size. So I uprezzed the images to 150 MB more or less, and opened up PTE again, failing to see that the images in PTE were still the smaller ones. so of course it worked. But when I saved them onto a usb drive and took them to the laptop, the 150 MB images were imported into PTE, and I got the load error. Then I tried the large files on the desktop, and although I got no load error, it was clearly too much for either PTE or my computer, as it did run, but very slowly, a minute or more between slides, then PTE baled out after about 4 slides. Possibly where 2000 just baled out, XP might give the load error message, but it's moot, since it doesn't work in either OS. Just on file sizes, HDTV at 1920*1050 pixels is 2 MP, so at 8-bit depth the file size is about 6 MB. For a five-times zoom the file need only be about 30 MB, and at that you can push the zoom a bit further, say 7 times before the definition falls off noticeably. Likewise, you could probably manage a 10x zoom with a file size about 40 or 45 MB. I resized my images to 4,600* 3082, which gave a file size of about 42 MB, and the show ran normally on my desktop. Perhaps this is what you have to do. Unless your requirements are for a greater zoom depth than 10x, I don't think you need bigger than 45 MB. Colin

Hold everything while I do some re-checking. I may have an inadvertent problem here ... back asap Colin

Well, I'm getting pessimistic about your problem, Ray. Actually, during my playing around, I did define only the fade transition, but when I increased the file sizes to 200MB it was a fresh start and I just left the random transitions, but i did set the screen to 16:9, and checked that D3D was on. I also loaded just today a sound track and synced it to the slides None of these changes made any difference. The show still previewed and ran as before. I even made an ISO file, and it ran in WMP, a bit stuttery, but it ran. But, now the plot thickens. I transferred the project files from my P4/win 2000 machine to my Dell 1520 laptop. This machine has a duo core 1.8GHz processor, 3 GB ram, a GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor, a 160 GB 7200 rpm HD, - and Win XP Pro. On paper, this should be a better machine than my desktop - but attempting to preview the same slides that ran on my Win 2000 machine presented me with the load error that you are getting. I can't find where the message is coming from, and it doesn't look like a standard Windows message box - far from it, in fact. But, I'm thinking it has to be something to do with Windows, since all the other programs like Java, DirectX, etc. are on my desktop, and the only difference is Win 2000 and Win XP Pro. Given the horsepower of your machine, I think it has to be XP I have suspected before that Microsoft's sudden change of heart over XP is for ulterior motives, and I wonder if they have built some of their DRM checking 'features' into the service packs, which could possibly be the cause of the problem. Could you find a machine running win 2000 that you could experiment with? 2000 doesn't recognise multiple processors, so I don't want to put it on this laptop, even though I prefer 2000 to XP. Colin

Peter is right, the projector is doing the uprezzing. My setup at the local camera club is a Dell laptop with a 1680*1050 wide screen, and a 1024*768 projector. If the projector is fed with the video card resolution set for screen res., the projector downsizes the images, but they are out of shape due to the different aspect ratio. So I set the screen res of the lappy to 1024*768, and the projector then shows properly. Since your setup is the inverse, i.e. your projector has more resolution than your laptop, the projector must be uprezzing the images, and since laptop and projector aspect ratios are the same, the image should look ok, maybe not quite sharp. Can you set the laptop resolution to match the projector? Colin

Yes - if I knew where to upload it! If you can tell me where, it'll be a snap. Meanwhile more bad or good news, depending on your point of view I thought I would really stress this thing, so I increased the file sizes to 10,000 * 6700 approx., that's a file size of 200 megabytes. Twelve of those is 2.4GB, far bigger than my 1 GB of memory. But, with all other parameters unchanged, PTE previewed and ran the same as before, no hiccups, no stutters, just a smooth show. It would appear that PTE is not the problem with your system. Colin

Hello Ray, Yep, have done. Image sizes as before, options set to 16:9 (DVD), monitor set at 1280*1024, full screen and hardware acceleration (D3D) on, 4 seconds per slide and and 1.5 secs transitions for each slide (default settings), all 12 slides set for 500% zoom, and all panned away from the central part of the image. I'm sorry to tell you this, but the show ran as before, not so much as a single stutter throughout the show. I thought of uploading it, but here in New Zealand the upload speed is throttled to only 128Mb/s, so it would take for ever. I would think XP Pro 64-bit should handle your slides easily, specially with your computer specs. What other software is running when you have this problem? My machine has ZoneAlarm Pro only, I don't run anything like Norton or McAfee. Colin