Laptop-configuration

[goddi]

Hello again Gary,

I forgot to explain why the choices are 16-bit or 32-bit in your video driver. In actual fact images with 8-bit depth are actually 8 bits per primary colour, so the total for 3 colours is 24 bits, or three bytes. But because Windows works in 32-bit which is four bytes at a time, it uses a dummy byte so it can work with 3-byte variables, a sort of padding to suit the 32-bit environment. The image is still only 3 bytes or 24 bits, the extra byte is just ignored.

In 16-bit mode, the colour depth is reduced to 4 bits per colour, 12 bits of information, and the remaining 4 bits are padded to make 2 bytes.

The same happens in your camera. My Canon uses 14 bits of data in RAW mode, but is padded out to 16 bits for the cpu, and again the last 2 bits are ignored.

That's my 2 bit's worth.

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Colin,

Thanks for the info.

I have been going around to the computer stores and trying out my PTE shows on various laptops just to see what happens. I have been surprised that many times the video clip portions of the slideshows will not play smoothly on many, but play very well on others. I can't tell what might be causing this but the salemen say it must be the video card. Though the worst was when I played a show on a Sony with 2 gb on the memory card. The show actually stopped playing during a video clip. So it pays to test PTE shows on the laptop before you buy it.

But something else has me wondering. When I play PTE shows from a memory stick on my desktop PC, it starts practically immediately. When I play the same PTE shows on laptops, there is a very long pause before the show starts. It seems to happen on every laptop I have tested. Can you explain what is going on?

Gary

[Barry Beckham]

I have been surprised that many times the video clip portions of the slideshows will not play smoothly on many, but play very well on others.

This is exactly what I discovered and some very high spec machines with the price to match were the worst, but I couldn't put my finger on why one would play an animated show in my case and one wouldn't. To be honest if I didn't have to tuck the PC under my arm from time to time, I wouldn't have a laptop as a gift.

[cjdnzl]

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Colin,

Thanks for the info.

I have been going around to the computer stores and trying out my PTE shows on various laptops just to see what happens. I have been surprised that many times the video clip portions of the slideshows will not play smoothly on many, but play very well on others. I can't tell what might be causing this but the salemen say it must be the video card. Though the worst was when I played a show on a Sony with 2 gb on the memory card. The show actually stopped playing during a video clip. So it pays to test PTE shows on the laptop before you buy it.

But something else has me wondering. When I play PTE shows from a memory stick on my desktop PC, it starts practically immediately. When I play the same PTE shows on laptops, there is a very long pause before the show starts. It seems to happen on every laptop I have tested. Can you explain what is going on?

Gary

I tried running a 58 megabyte PTE show direct from a folder on my Dell laptop, it opened and ran within 2 seconds or so. Then I ran another show about the same size from a memory stick, which took about 4 seconds to open and run.

I put the small difference down to the stick being slower than the hard drive, but not by much at all. I can't think why your laptop experience of shows having a very long pause would be, unless you are using a USB 1.1 stick, or perhaps the lappys you tried all had slow graphics. A lot of laptops use a fairly basic graphics chip on the main board which shares ram memory with programs and other data, as opposed to having a dedicated graphics board with its own memory and a much more powerful chip. So-called business machines often have only basic on-board graphics which will handle relatively static output, like word processors and spreadsheets, and DVD videos which run at just under 30 frames/sec, but choke on PTE shows which run at 60 frames/sec.

Perhaps somebody else may have a better idea. This laptop I use has a dedicated graphics board with its own unshared 512 megabytes memory.

Regards,

Colin