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Bruno, Perhaps this diagram will make it clearer for you. Colin

There aren't many laptops that allow you to swap graphics and sound cards around; generally you can't change what the machine comes with. They're not like a desktop where you have four or five slots to play with. The internals of laptops are so tight that fitting a different card is generally not possible; and the cards do not have edge connectors like desktop models, they have wired plugs that mate with sockets on the card. Your best bet is to aim towards a laptop with a dedicated graphics card, like a mid-range gaming machine, built to handle considerable graphics-intensive programs. Programs like PicturesToExe version 5.n make extensive use of the graphics chip (GPU), using the hardware rendering capabilites of such chips to give the outstanding quality typical of PTE, particularly PZR effects, but this demands a good graphics chip, preferably an Nvidia 8600M GT or better. The Nvidia software puts an icon on the taskbar which allows you to quickly select any of the available screen pixel sizes, essential when driving a data projector with dimensions different from the laptop The GPU running graphics-intensive programs can run quite hot, so you need to avoid laptops that have potential overheating problems. As you want to stay with XP - good choice there - you may need to go to a brand like Dell which allows you to specify what you want in your computer, including the OS. I think you'd have a hard time trying to buy an off-the-shelf machine with XP; they all come with Vista nowadays. I went through this process for my own club last year, and settled on a Dell 1520 with 1.8 GHz duo processor, and Nvidia 8600M GT GPU, and XP SP2. This machine performs very well with PTE programs, and the sound from the Sigmatel High-Definition codec and the sound card is very good indeed. You could do worse than visiting the Dell UK website, and perusing what they have to offer. I have found their support outstanding; each machine they sell has a unique ID number, and when you log onto their Support Centre they know immediately all about your computer and can offer you the right upgrades and fixes necessary on-line. IMHO this beats hands-down taking the machine back to a retailer who then sends it out to a repair outfit somewhere. Best of luck with your choice, Colin

Laura, Use the Windows clipboard to extract the reg key from the email, open Notepad and copy the key into that program, then save it in a folder of your choice as [filename].reg (be sure to use .reg as the filename extension). Then double-click on that file, which will cause it to be inserted into the registry, from where any version of PTE will find it. Alternatively, you can name the file [filename].key, and put it in the PTE folder under c:\program files\wnsoft pictures to exe\5.5, where PTE will look for it and automatically insert it into the registry. Make sure you get all of and only the key string from the email. Colin

Thanks to Igor and Brian for comments and suggestions about this little problem. Following Brian's advice, I tried a different (LCD) monitor but the problem still existed - but that let out my wife's monitor from suspicion. So I tried Igor's advice and logged on to Windows update, and it offered me Directx 9 which I installed, and thereby fixed the problem. Although a low-end card, the 9250 worked reasonably well, a small amount of jerkiness with scrolling page turns, but otherwise acceptable. My wife is pleased, and I'm pleased (I don't have to buy her a new graphics card ) That's not being 'tight', it's just that she seldom plays AVs, and she is happy with the level of performance from the 9250. Colin.

I had occasion to run a PTE show on my wife's computer, an Asus P4P-800 deluxe board, Prescott P4 CPU at 3.00 GHz, 512 MB memory, and an ATI A9250 graphics card. The CRT monitor is set at 1024x768 and 85 Hz refresh. I know the 9250 is a low-end card, but there is little animation in the show, and it appears to run normally, except that each image appears on the screen in triplicate, each one squashed to 1/3rd of the screen width, but normal height. I downloaded and installed the latest drivers I could find, but the triple images persist. Has anybody struck this before, before I junk the card and go buy an Nvidia? Colin

You can safely download and install XP SP2, which has been out for some time now. But I would be cautious about SP3 until the FUD clears a bit. I always make an image backup of my C: drive before any major update is applied; that way I can reinstall the system if necessary. Colin.

Hello Brian, At this point I don't know the detailed answers to most of those questions; those I can answer are interleaved below. I decided to answer publicly because others may be interested as well. You can access the PSNZ website for more information on http://www.photography.org.nz/index.htm

I am watching this thread with considerable interest. Early next year our club will be host to the National Exhibition held in conjunction with the National Convention of the Photographic Society of New Zealand - PSNZ for short. PSNZ tell me to expect about 2,000 images and photographs for this competition, and we have to find the software to not only present the images for the judges with on-the-fly culling of the rejects, but also to keep track of the owners and the entry fees. This is a great forum Colin.

They probably have a pocket-sized video camera they hosepipe all over the place with ambient sound and think that is AV. AV shows of the calibre of yours are like classical music played at railway stations and shopping malls to drive away the vandals. The author of the comment above is clearly a vandal. Colin

As your card is brand new, could you return it to the store and get an Nvidia card instead, maybe a GeForce 7600 GT or better? The reason is that some ATI cards cause loss of the ICC profile attached to your monitor when running a 5.n PTE show. Nvidia cards do not exhibit this behavior. The bug is in the ATI driver software and is well known, and a search of posts in this forum will find numerous references to this problem. There are some work-arounds which might or might not work; personally I would change the card. Colin

Use PTE VideoBuilder to make an ISO file (I can't remember the key sequence but you should be able to find it in the VB screens), and then download a program called 'ImgBurn', a free and very useful utility for burning ISO files to DVD. Colin.

Have you changed disk brands? Not all DVD disks are created equal. Try another good brand of disk if you can. Perhaps after that number of disks written the laser lenses in your burner need cleaning, or maybe you need a new burner. Colin

Brian, with respect, I think your definition of 'animation' is rather outdated in this computer age. Wikipedia defines animation as movement of a whole image, as well as movement within an image, and they show a rotating Planet Earth as an example of animation. Many older terms have been redefined to encompass newer concepts, as in photoshop and word processor programs, and the daddy of them all is Microsoft's use of the word 'font' to mean typeface, thoroughly upsetting professional printers and typesetters. To them, 'font' is plain wrong. From Wikipedia again, 'font' is "traditionally defined as a complete character set of a single size of a particular typeface. For example, all characters for 9 point Bulmer is a font, and the 10 point size would be another font. Since the introduction of personal computers, a broader definition has evolved. The term font is now often used as a metonym for a typeface". I guess, since the introduction of scalable typefaces, the word 'font' in it's original meaning is outdated, so font has come to mean typeface at any point size. But the purists still shudder at these changes. It's all part of everchanging English, I guess. 'Cool' in my day meant not quite cold, 'camp' was done with a tent, and a 'gay'person was one full of fun and laughter. Not so today. 'Animation' now includes whole-image movement. Colin.

My camera club has just done the same exercise, and ended up buying a medium-size stereo system from TradeMe, a New Zealand based internet auction site, sold by a person who was upgrading his system. A Panasonic 50w RMS per channel system, it easily fills our hall, and on shows like 'Atomium' the sound is fantastic. (Atomium is a fabulous showpiece for PTE, blows the audience away every time, all credit to the Belgian authors). It seems a lot of the available second-hand equipment is from people who are upgrading to 5.1 or surround sound and home theatre systems, and disposing of perfectly good, powerful stereo systems when doing so. Active speakers have individual amplifiers built in to the enclosures, and I don't know how controllable they are from a tonal and balance point of view, but we preferred a central amplifier with a remote control, which works well for our purposes. Laptop sound ports generally put out a line-level signal ( about 1 volt RMS), which should match the input sensitivity of any amplifier with a line-in port, so there is no 'maximum' size of speaker from the laptop's perspective. Later, I intend to investigate using Bluetooth between the laptop and amplifier to eliminate the stereo cable, since the club computer and my own machine, both Dell 1520s, have built-in Bluetooth capability, and I need only to fit a Bluetooth receiver into the stereo unit. This gear was purchased for a few tens of dollars, far cheaper than buying new, and it is in near-new condition. Colin

My computer has just informed me that the XP3 update is available for download, and is offering to instal it. Here is the accompanying message from the installer: "Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) is an update to Windows XP that addresses key feedback from our customers and is a cumulative update that includes all previously released updates for Windows XP, including security updates. Windows XP SP3 contains a small number of new updates and should not significantly change the Windows XP experience. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer. More information for this update can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936929" I have not installed it, and will not until more info becomes available. Colin

Have you looked in your spam folder, and/or in the spam folder on your mail server? My ISP here uses Yahoo to manage email, and their spam filters are erratic, so much so that every day I have to log on to the web version of my mailbox and peruse ther spam folder, where I frequently find genuine emails - and conversely, I get emails in my inbox that are clearly spam. Apparently my ISP has given up the fight and left it to the individual to manage his spam. Colin

Thanks again to all of you who took the time to add a reply to this thread. This is a great forum, one of the best! Yes, I accept that I made the mistake of not setting up a new filename in the required folder, and I did just open PTE and delete the show therein, replacing the images with the new ones, expecting a new show to be created. However, I have learned the lesson. From now on I will always use the ' Create backup in ZIP' option ( I have done sometimes ), and I will use the Save As option as well. Funny though, I generally use Save As when in Photoshop, so why I didn't in PTE I can't say. I am about to start rebuilding the lost show, it's all good practice, and you can bet your last dollar I won't lose it again. Kind regards to all, Colin

My thanks to all who answered so promptly, and as I guessed in my post above, it was probably my fault. However, usually with a Windows program, such as Word, Excel, Wordperfect, and numerous others, if one starts a new file that is un-named, hitting 'save' causes the program to ask for folder and filename before saving the file, they do not simply write to the last known filename, so I feel in this case that PTE perhaps should do the same. In this respect I feel that PTE is non-standard It is a great program, and I do not like criticising. Thanks again, Colin

I have encountered a serious problem which hopefully might be my fault, but I fear it is not. I have several shows stored in separate folders on my E: drive; the original images for each show are in their own folder together with the project1.pte file, and the finished exe file for the show. A show I finished on Thursday last was in a folder called 'Middlemiss', a genealogical show for use at a reunion on the weekend. It went well, and several persons requested a copy which I undertook to deliver on a CD. During the weekend, I was delegated to take the 'official' photographs, which I did, about fifty shots, placed into a new folder called, surprisingly enough, 'Reunion Images'. I called up PTE, changed folders to to the new folder, removed the images of the reunion slide show, and added the images I took that day, set the duration to 7 secs each, set PTE to loop until stopped, and hit 'Create', expecting an exe file to be placed in the current folder with the camera images. The exe creation was instant, without offering a chance to say where I wanted it, or to name it. I was astonished, and then dismayed to find that the project and exe files had been written to the 'Middlemiss' folder instead of the current folder, and had wiped out both the exe file and the project file for that program. All the work done for that show was gone. Yes, I should have backed it up, but I finished that show at 3.00 am, and had to be on the road the next morning, so it didn't get backed up. If it is my fault, what did I do wrong? and has anyone else encountered this problem? Colin

Hello all, Well, regardless of whether the posts above are technical. emotional, scare-mongering, satirical, whatever, the point for me is that we are alerted to the fact that XP3 is coming. What we do about it is up to our individual reaction, but we have been warned, and forewarned is forearmed. This one of the absolute strengths of forums like this; the collective knowledge of the whole is greater than one could ever achieve singly. Colin

Is it really a Moiré effect, or it is a shimmering effect when the image is zooming, but absent when the image is stationary? If the latter is the case, it isn't Moiré, but rather a consequence of a too-sharp image, and a slight softening with Gaussian blur will cure the problem. Colin

In a bit more detail, the computer was set to 1280*1024, and the image was fed to a 1024*768 projector. The projector resized the image to 768 high, but was short on the 1024 dimension because of the 1280*1024 ratio of 5:4, since the projector ratio is 4:3. The actual image width was 768*1280/1024 pixels, = 960 pixels, short by 64 pixels, 32 each side. Personally, I don't really like the 1280*1024 screens, the 5:4 aspect ratio is too square for my liking, and most desktop displays are stretched vertically to fill the screen. OTOH, my laptop wide screen at 1680*1050 gives a ratio of 16:10 which I find really good. To each his own, I guess. Colin

Hello Barry, Perhaps 'locked out' is a bit strong, and I guess there are different rules for different competitions, but here the Photographic Society of New Zealand (PSNZ) specifies 1024*768 for shows entered in its competitions. I did run one of your shows on my Epson EMP 730 1024*768 projector, and it did resize the images, but left black lines on both sides of the screen, which I guess might count against it in a competition. I have to say your shows are of a very high standard indeed. Colin

Hello Brian et al, Part of the problem mentioned in your first paragraph is caused by the exhibitors, who, particularly in competitions, will complain loudly if the computer/projector combo alters their slide show in any way at all. They expect the system will show their slides at the original pixel dimensions, hence the competiton rules attempt to circumnavigate this by specifying set dimensions, usually 1024*768, locking out those like barry bbdigital with his 1280*1024 images. Also, I have to disagree with you regarding your second paragraph; an 8-bit 1024*768 image is always 2,359,296 bytes (1024*768*3). The file containing that image may vary depending on compression applied, but the displayed image does not vary. Regards, Colin

Well, no, I don't think any way of running successive shows will prevent the desktop from showing between the last slide of one show and the beginning of the next, as the computer needs significant time to load the next program. Programs of, say, 20 to 80 to 90 megabytes need a few seconds to load. You might have to accept the interruption as inevitable. Colin