Hatter

Great news - thanks, Igor!

Great news. Thank you, Igor.

I had it too - we probably all have! I didn't bother to click on the link.

That link works for me. It looks like you have a local issue somewhere.

You just download & install the new version, Miles. If you've already got a registered version installed, the new version will recognise that.

Hi Leona, I use "Irfanview" to resize batches of images. http://www.irfanview.com/ The "Faststone" re-sizer is also very popular. http://www.faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm You can use either of those to resize a large number of photos in a single go. HTH Gareth

Hi bwat At the bottom of the "Screen" tab in Project Options, there's a box titled "Disable scaling of main images (not recommended)". You need to tick that... and probably then click on the "Set for existing slides" button immediately underneath. Hope that helps... Gareth

As far as I can see, the size of the .exe file is the sum total of the .jpg and .mp3 files used, plus a tiny amount of code. As the .jpg & .mp3 files are already heavily compressed, I can't see there's any scope for further compressing the .exe file to any noticeable effect. The best way to keep the file size down is to make sure your images are no larger than they need to be - PTE works fine with the 3072 x 2048 pixel images straight from my camera but if the show is never going to be viewed at a resolution greater than 1280 x 1024 the full size images are a lot larger than necessary. Reducing the display size to less than full screen by using smaller images would indeed reduce the file size further, but (in my opinion) that would greatly reduce the impact of your slideshow. As Ken says... up to 100mb should be acceptable to download. I suppose you could offer a "small" version as well as the full show. Gareth

Igor, There's already a banner-type link on the "Links" page of my site and another on the Audio-Visual page as part of the text. Let me know if I need to make any changes to these to make them more Google-friendly. (http://www.garethkitchener.org.uk) Gareth

Welcome back Igor.

DRM is a ridiculous concept. It simply doesn't work as it's so easy to get round that anyone who really wants to make unprotected versions can do so, which means that DRM is just an inconvenience to the purchaser. As Chris has said, Tunebite will do the job perfectly. I use it to get standard MP3 files from stuff I've bought on iTunes so I can play them on my MP3 player. Another option is to burn the music to CD and then "rip" the CD using Audiograbber (or even Windows Media Player). This is all fine for private use only - you need to be careful about making shows available to a wider audience if they include copyrighted music. These sites have freely downloadable music that you can use in your shows without restriction. http://www.incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/ http://derekaudette.ottawaarts.com/music.php Gareth

Sorry... I misunderstood then. I had thought that the amount of RAM taken by an image in memory depended solely on the number of pixels rather than the contents of those pixels, but if that's not the case then fair enough. A combination of cropping it down and a small resize did the trick anyway! Gareth

Thanks for the replies, everyone. Lin - your suggestion of cropping the image down does help - thanks. I cropped it to this: and then downsized it a bit to 1500 x 800 - which was small enough for my laptop to handle it. cjdnzl - it was running from the laptop's hard drive rather than a DVD. I've not tried running from a DVD but I've found that even running from CD is slower than running from the HD. I've been using PTE on this laptop for some time for the competitions at my local camera club and I originally tried running them from a CD but found that the images changed quicker and much more smoothly if I copied the EXE file to the laptop. Al / Lin - I'm not convinced it's the file size that matters. I used a JPEG quality of 6 which compressed the image down to around 750k - I think it's the image size in memory that's the problem. Igor - does the following help? Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator Driver for Mobile Report Report Date: 06/15/2007 Report Time[hr:mm:ss]: 18:27:18 Driver Version: 6.14.10.4543 Operating System: Windows XP* Home Edition, Service Pack 2 (5.1.2600) Default Language: English DirectX* Version: 9.0 Physical Memory: 246 MB Minimum Graphics Memory: 8 MB Maximum Graphics Memory: 128 MB Graphics Memory in Use: 10 MB Processor: x86 family 6 Model 14 Stepping 8 Processor Speed: 1463 MHZ Vendor ID: 8086 Device ID: 27A2 Device Revision: 03 * Accelerator Information * Accelerator in Use: Mobile Intel® 945GM Express Chipset Family Video BIOS: 1237 Current Graphics Mode: 1280 by 800 True Color (60 Hz) * Devices Connected to the Graphics Accelerator * Active Notebook Displays: 1 * Notebook * Monitor Name: Plug and Play Monitor Display Type: Digital Gamma Value: 2.0 DDC2 Protocol: Supported Maximum Image Size: Horizontal: Not Available Vertical: Not Available Monitor Supported Modes: 1280 by 800 (60 Hz) Display Power Management Support: Standby Mode: Not Supported Suspend Mode: Not Supported Active Off Mode: Not Supported * Other names and brands are the property of their respective owners.

Just an observation on PTE5 that others may find helpful if they encounter the same issue... I've been trying out the zoom & pan features and I'd set up one slide that was a photograph looking through an arch. I wanted to set it up so that the view zoomed into the scene on the other side, making it appear that the viewer was going through the arch. In order to keep the resolution of the "zoomed" image about equal to the other slides, I used the full sized image rather than a resized one. The photo as taken was 3072 pixels high by 2048 wide and I padded the sides with black to make it 4096 wide: The end point of the animation was the central part, filling the full screen, like this: This works fine on my desktop PC (2.8 GHz CPU with 1 Gb ram) but my laptop (1.4 GHz CPU with 256 Mb ram) can't handle it - the sound breaks up and the slide before this one stays on screen for ages. Then the end frame only of the animation is displayed, followed by the next few slides in quick succession until it catches up with where it should be. I'm guessing that the processing power needed for PTE to resize the image that big on the fly is beyond the capabilities of my laptop - even though it (just) meets the minimum requirements for PTE with pan/zoom. If I resize it to 1024 x 768 like all the other slides, it's fine on the laptop, although there's obviously a noticeable drop in image quality at the end of the "zoom". Gareth

Yes, I have the magazine. It's a 4 page article, of which half a page is about PTE. I'll send you a PM later. {EDIT: PM sent.} Gareth