650 meg slideshow crashes on some PCs

[richards]

Hi. I've created a Pictures To Exe slideshow for some kids at my local school (I am official photographer at their end of year prom). I managed to get the slideshow down to 650 meg so it would fit on a CD. I tested the slideshow on two machines at home and, although it took a while to load up, it did run ok. At school they haven't managed to get it working. It crashed two of their machines and on another it ran half way through and then froze up. I have a feeling at least one of their machines may have been Vista - my two at home are XP.

Are there any known problems with slideshows of a certain size and/or running them under Vista? Richard

[Igor]

Please let me know - what version of PicturesToExe you have used - old v4.48 or new 5.0 ?

Probably the problem in CD disc? Please try to write slideshow again on another CD disc, or to a flash drive. And copy this EXE file with slideshow from the CD disc to hard disc of a PC before run.

Also try to run another small slide show on those PCs (say 5 or 30 MB).

We've tested PicturesToExe Deluxe 5.0 under Windows Vista, of course.

[Ken Cox]

copy the exe from the cd to the desktop and try running it direct from the computer

ken

[richards]

copy the exe from the cd to the desktop and try running it direct from the computer

ken

Hi Ken - they have tried that but apparently the show still crashed.

[Conflow]

Hi Richards,

Firstly, 650mB of Pte Show is certainly asking a lot of School Computers compared to the

average Pte Show of 25~50mB. I assume we talking about Pte.CD's and not Pte.DVD Shows ?.

A 650mB Show is going to 'over-tax' the RAM Memory(User Memory) of an average School PC

and its going to 'over-limit' the amount of Virtual Memory which the PC is prepared to donate in

an effort to maintain the running of the Program. Put quite simply there is an awful lot going on

within a Pte.Show what with fast Transitions, Effects, Images, Music, and Text ~ all use up the

RAM Memory, then the PC tries to create an amount of Virtual Memory to accomodate the Show.

It will only do that if there is some Virtual Memory available....

The 650mB Show is virtually the same size as the entire XP-Operating System

Seems to me as if the School PC's have run out of Steam, that Show is simply too big and the

answer lies in your Post ~ "It runs on my Xp-PC's but takes time to load" ~ ask yourself, why ?

Brian.Conflow.

[Ronniebootwest]

I have to agree with Brian, 650mb is far to ambitious (and such a long show might tend to be rather boring also) Why not split the show into separate .exe shows and link them together in a 'daisy chain' using the option 'Run show after last slide'

Ron

[Guest Techman1]

Richard,

Welcome to the forum. I've done a few projects like this for the schools and found that I had to reduce all my images down to a smaller size (e.g., 1024x768 or a little larger if zooming was needed). Also, making sure all your music files are MP3 so the size is greatly reduced verse WAV files (other formats are smaller also). These factors greatly reduce the overall size of the EXE slideshow and generally allow most PC's to run the PTE slideshows.

Good luck and please let us know a few more details about the number of slides, size of slides (in pixels), type of music files used, etc.

Regards,

Fred

[ksf]

Brian and Ron have hinted at the most obvious reasons - your PC (even if it does load/run your show slowly) is still probably a higher spec machine than your ave. school pc. As Ron has also said you could try breaking the show down into smaller chunks but you haven't said how long the show runs for, how many images you have used, or even what size your images are. My guess is that you are using full size images saved at full resolution. Copy each image and try cropping them down to 1024x768px (pretty much the norm for most shows and certainly probably ideal for school projection), and if using photoshop, save them as .jpg images with a quality settingof 8-10. For school use I would aim for a file size of say 300-500Kb per image - remember if anyone wantsd a print of a particular shot you will still have the original full size image files to print from. Also are there any duplicated or very similar shots that you could edit out of the show (i.e. do you really need to include them all?).

[Mr. President]

@richards:

Why you don´t separate disc by themes like cars, flowers, houses....!

Each .exe will be smaller, loading faster and without any interuptions on every computer.

My slides containing about 100 pics b a size of 20MB (created with another tool )

Regards

Kai (Germany)

[KGHalbe]

For the most part, when I make a slideshow, I generally will drop the resolution to either 800x600, or 1024x768. This allows quick loading of the pictures, and on the computer display, the pictures still look fine. If you are going to crop, or zoom, you may want to use a bit higher resolution on that picture.

I found when I used resolutions higher than what I mentioned, many slower computers can't keep up. So, if a slide is to display for 4 seconds, it may take the computer 6 seconds to load the next slide, throwing the timing off.

I also include, on the CD or DVD that I make, a folder that contains all the ORIGINAL pictures. I tell the people that if they want copies, use the pictures from this folder.

I believe that when most people are looking at a slideshow, they are NOT looking at the finer details of the pictures, but rather looking at the image that the picture represents.

Of course, this is my view, and I am sure that there are many opposing views. But I have found that this works well for me.

KGHalbe

P.S. Thanks to all who helped me with my last problem (using PS7 and converting to greyscale - not working for P2E). Once I corrected the problem, I was able to finish the wedding slideshow and give it to the bride and groom. They, and their families, just loved it !!