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Could you give some details of your computer - memory size, graphics card processor unit, cpu speed? Your problem might be software, or it might be that your computer is not up to the requirements of PTE v.5. Our old camera club machine, a laptop with only on-board Intel graphics could not even start a PTE show, throwing an error I can't now remember. Colin

Aaahh, yes, I thought it did, but when I checked it didn't seem to work. Must have been too hasty, I guess

First class imagery on my Nvidia 8600M GT card - but there was no sound, only a subdued sort of wind noise. Is that right? Colin.

Hi Brian, depending on your browser, you can hit the '-' key to reduce the size of the screen image so it fits on your screen, and the "+" key to increase. Opera does this, and so does Firefox. I don't know about IE since I never use it. Hang on, I think you are using a Mac - I know nothing about Macs, but maybe their browser does likewise. Colin. STOP PRESS: I just tried it in Firefox and it doesn't seem to work there, but it definitely does with Opera.

On the subject of resizing images for PTE, and rather than doing it in Photoshop,, I use Irfanview's batch resizing, which has extensive resizing by pixel count, cropping and/or 'shapeshifting' if you want to reshape a 3:2 image to 4:3 without cropping (personally, that idea appals me; I would far prefer to crop if necessary, but I make my shows as 3:2 anyway). The resizing operation in Irfanview uses a Lanczos algorithm which in my opinion is superior to PS's bicubic, and using Irfanview's advanced menu, you can auto-crop from 3:2 to 4:3 by trimming the ends of the image, resize all images to a constant long side at (say) 1024 pixels, and sharpen to taste after resizing, all in one pretty fast operation, about one to two images per second on my 3 GHz P4 machine. In any case, have fun with PTE, it's a great program! Colin

Version 5 is different from earlier versions, in that it uses the graphics card much more intensively than Version 4 did. It sounds like your graphics card is not up to the job with v. 5. You don't say exactly what you are doing, but you can assist the graphics chip by reducing the size of your slide images to 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768 pixels, whatever your computer screen is set to, specially if you are using high quality images straight out of your camera, typically several megabytes each, whereas a 1024 x 768 image is only about 400-odd kilobytes, much easier on your system Don't be caught by looking at your image sizes on the disk, if they are jpeg they may report as a megabyte more or less, but as an image they expand to full size, maybe six or more times bigger, that PTE has to handle. If all else fails, you can still download 4.48 and use that - it should recognise your existing ver. 5 key. Let's know how you get on, Colin

You surprise me, Brian. I have always understood that filenames and folder names are case independent in Windows - and the old 8.3 names in DOS likewise. Does PTE make a distinction then between upper and lower case names? Colin

Hopefully you also got an Intel duo core processor of at least 1.6GHz, and a GB or more of memory, plus a 7200 rpm hard drive of at least 100GB, and a 1680 x 1050 screen? Then you have an excellent machine. Congratulations. Colin

I'm not sure I understand your problem. 55 images at 10 seconds each gives a duration of 550 seconds, or 9.17 minutes, yet your sound duration is 21.5 minutes. I would expect your slides would finish and leave the sound continuing for another 12-odd minutes. Perhaps you could clarify with some more information. Colin.

Try this link: http://www.free-codecs.com/guides/How_to_f...40154_error.htm Colin

Well, I'm somewhat taken aback by these posts talking about limiting digital images to XGA dimensions, 1024x768 pixels. Is this rule applied to prints made for competitions, or only for digital projection derived from an exhibition print? Most exhibitors of prints in our club are using 8 or 10 megapixel cameras, and their prints are in the range of 2,500 x 3,500 pixels, myself included, and there would be a riot if they were limited to 1024x768 prints. Please tell me that you don't limit prints to these dimensions. Colin

Kelly, Anthing that will renew interest, such as a change in tempo, a change in slide content, a new or different subject, will tend to maintain interest. Conversely, long periods of the same slide rhythm, similar sound bites, can lose viewers' interest and once lost, it's hard to get it back. You know what you want to do better than I do, but my penny's worth would be to shorten the show to about 20 minutes or so, remove redundant or repetitive shots, keep it tight and moving - emotionally as well. From what you have said, you have about 90 minutes of sound bites from about 26 people, so that equates to about 3 or 4 minutes per person. It might be difficult, but I would edit that to a minute or less per person, and go for about a 20-minute show - and that's not allowing for any music you might want to include. It will be tighter, faster, and more memorable than a nearly 2-hour show. My wife and I did a show for her parent's diamond (60th) wedding anniversary, about 150 slides and 14 music tracks - mostly shortened in Goldwave - that ran for just over 20 minutes. The last track was "I remember well" from Gigi - a duet between a man and his lady. His memory was failing, and she corrected his recall, whereupon he would reply "Ah, yes, I remember ... well". He sings " Am I getting old?", and she replies "Oh no, not you, you were so strong, so young and gay, the Prince of Love in ev'ry way" to which he again replies "Ah, yes, I remember ... well". The slides mirrored the words, interspersed shots of the couple when young and old, the last slide being of the old couple sitting on a bench in the garden. The show was very poignant, as although the song has him losing his memory, in fact my mother-in-law was suffering from Alzheimer's, and her memory was such that she couldn't remember half of her family. There wasn't a dry eye in the room among the 80 or so guests, and although it was some years ago now, that show is still remembered and occasionally shown again. Best of luck, Colin

Hello Jeff, I think this promises to be another of your most interesting shows. Your dog amazes me also, he/she seems to love heights, and standing on the very edge of huge drops! I don't know too many people who would go where that dog goes. To a non-American, the Utah scenery is just wild, untamed, compelling, breathtaking, and your choice of music, as always, is unusual, and excellent. Bring on the full show! Colin

Well, Kelly, firstly, a personal observation - 650 slides over an hour and three quarters is a very big show, asking a lot of viewers'attention spans, but of course it's your prerogative. To (partly) answer your questions: There are two ways to set the timing of slides; individually, and overall. If you set an overall time after having set custom timing for some slides, as I understand it there is no way for the program to differentiate between custom-timed slides and others, so they all get set the same. I have seen other slide show programs that allow proportional time adjustment (ProShow) but PTE does not seem to allow that. Your second question loses me somewhat. Why would you want to play the show in the timeline window? Third, adjusting the length of the show is easy. Apart from your problem of losing custom timing of some slides, you divide the show length in seconds by the number of slides, in your case 105 minutes is 6,300 seconds divided by 650 giving 9.692 seconds per slide, which you can set for all slides. Then using the timeline, you can move the timing for individual slides without altering the overall show length. It may well be a tedious job with 650 slides! Best of luck, Colin

Ken, Yes, bulbs are expensive, but their life is typically 2000 - 3000 hours. At an average of, say, an hour or two a month for camera club use, that's 1000 months minimum, or 83 years!!! And LCD TV's don't get off free, either, the projected life of an LCD display is about five years, when the brightness will be about 50% of new. I can't control pricing either, so we're evens there Colin

Hello Ronnie, My camera club looked at doing something similar, actually to project an image as the judge delivered his comments while discussing the actual print. The rationale for this was so the audience could see the image in detail instead of trying to see an A4 print from 20 feet away. The immediate problem that arose was that the data projector could not deliver the same image quality as the original print, and in fact the idea was abandoned on account of this. We were using an LCD projector, and probably a DLP machine may have been a bit better, but the conflicting requirements of light to see the print versus darkness to see the projected image also proved problematic. Just using the projector and not showing the print was not too well received by exhibitors either, some making the point that the time and expense of producing an exhibition print was wasted if judging was to be done on a projected image. Couriering fifty or sixty prints to a judge each month is not exactly cheap, and some angst ensued when it was thought that only the digital images on a CD might be sent instead, which meant that the judge would not see the prints. At any rate, the idea was dropped. Colin

For general interest, this link shows a pretty complete list of graphics cards in descending order of performance, compiled by an overclockers member. http://www.overclock.net/graphics-cards-ge...rd-ranking.html There are actually three x1300 cards, an x1300se, ranked lowest, then x1300 with no suffix, then x1300xt. Both the x1300se and x1300 rank well below the Nvidia 6600GT, considered minimal for good graphics performance, while the x1300xt ranks just above the 6600GT and below the 7300GT. Unfortunately, I would consider the x1300se and the x1300 as not good enough for advanced graphics, i.e. zooming and panning and/or fast slide changes. The x1300xt, like the Nvidia 6600GT, is marginal but probably usable for most, but not all, requirements of PTE 5. If a graphics card upgrade is to be considered, then an Nvidia card is preferable to ATI because of lost profile problems inherent with ATI cards. My recommendation for a mid-range card that will perform but not break the bank would be an Nvidia 8600GT, or perhaps better if it can be afforded. Colin

I am glad that I ordered my new Dell 1520 with XP instead of Vista, likewise the same laptop I bought for my camera club. My advice to persons buying a new machine is to insist on getting Vista Home Premium or better, or XP, or no deal. Microsoft have recognised problems with Vista by recanting on their hasty removal of XP from sale, and allowing XP sales to continue till June 2008. As I see the problem with Vista and PTE, Brian has said more than once that it appears to be related to Vista Home Basic only, and also the problem happens to other graphics programs as well, which points the finger to Vista Basic. Therefore, the solution for those afflicted is to either upgrade to Vista Home Premium, which will allow their programs and data to remain intact, or reinstall their drive with XP, which will necessitate a clean install, backing up all data and reinstalling all programs. I would take the machine back to the supplier, with a copy of Microsoft's paper on the subject (see Brians's link above), and request an upgrade to Home Premium or better. This should cure your problems with your club machine. Colin

Most DVD burning programs, Nero or Roxio, allow you to copy a DVD and then to burn DVD's from the copy file. The program will read the 'master'disk and store the copy on your hard drive, then you can specify how many copies you want, and just keep shovelling the blank disks in as directed. Should take around five minutes or so per copy. Colin

Thanks, Brian, nice to have confirmation of my choice. It goes very well, and the surprise is the battery lasts for more than 4 hours even with the 8600M GT graphics card. It also runs cooler than the Alienware, whose battery life was only about an hour and a half. Regarding the stalling problem, I haven't had it since from the same memory stick, so maybe XP has seen the exe files and all is ok. I saw your other post about spending all day trying to get Vista to behave - I bet the bloke dumps Vista and goes for XP! Kind regards, Colin

OK, this is an unusual but easy way to do it. Open the email from Wnsoft, and locate the attached file called reg.txt Double-click on the filename, and open it in Notepad - do not use a word processor. The text shown in Notepad will start with 'REGEDIT4', followed by random characters - which are the key. Click on File/Save As (NOT save), and choose the folder you want to put it in. A memory stick might make it easier to save to. Now, put the cursor in the filename line by clicking the mouse in the line, then hit the'End' key. This should take the cursor the the end of the filename. Now, type in '.reg' - without the quotes of course, so the filename will be reg.reg. Any file with the extension '.reg' can be run as a program, and will insert the contents of the file into the registry, which is what we want to do. Exit the email, and use Windows Explorer to find the file, then simply double-click the file. Presto, you will get a message saying the file has been inserted into the registry. Now, if you run PTE and click on Help/About PTE you should see 'Licensed to', your name, followed by 'Deluxe Edition'. You can save the file into the PTE folder, where you can use it directly if you have to do a reinstall at any stage. Colin

Would it not be the same if I boot the computer with the flash drive inserted? When it finds the FD it should register the programs the same as if they were on the HD? Colin

For what it's worth, I have just been through the same experience. Off-the-shelf machines seldom have proper graphics cards, mostly they have the Intel Accelerated Graphics 900 or 950 which is adequate for simpler graphics, but not for the demands of PTE. I wanted a machine with a separate graphics card, as high-end as possible. The only course available was a custom-built to order machine, so after a couple of false starts, I ordered a Dell 1520 with Windows XP - no Vista for me, thanks - note Microsoft has relented, and XP will be available until June 2008. I specified an Intel Duo core 1.8 GHZ CPU, 2 GB ram, 160 GB 7200 rpm HD, geforce 8600GT graphics card - not the top, but damned good, a 1680x1050 LCD screen (there's also 1280x800 and 1440x900 if you prefer). The computer is of course fan-cooled, there aren't too many heat-pipe laptops around, but cooling is ok. Performance is stunning. Lin Evans' 'Puzzle' show is a real test of a computer system, and this machine runs it effortlessly. Also, the sound was a surprise. Most laptops have tinny sound, naturally, but the audio from the Dell is the best I've heard from any laptop. Have a look at the Dell website. I am very pleased with mine. Colin

The scanner should have converted to a positive if you chose the settings for scanning a negative. However, it's very simple in Photoshop. With the negative image on screen, click on Image/Adjust/Invert, or simply press Ctrl_I. Both methods will turn your negative into a positive. You will probably have to use Levels or Curves to correct the tonal balance after the invert step. Colin PS: I don't think Curves is available in Elements, if that's what you use, but Levels is fine.