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Very Slow Powerpoint

  1. #1

    Very Slow Powerpoint

    Our lab has just upgraded to Office 2007 running on Windows XP. I am having trouble with the following sequence:
    1 slide Powerpoint (.pps)
    display an image file (.jpg)
    ask for a scale Response
    1 slide Powerpoint Show (.pps)
    display an image file (.jpg)
    ask for a scale response

    It takes 30 seconds for each Powerpoint Show to display (screen is black with a hour glass)

    With Office 2003 on my laptop, it is instanteous

  2. #2
    jarvis24 Blair Jarvis, Administrator
    Does the same thing happen if you run condition 2 of the basic sample that comes with MediaLab?

  3. #3
    Yes, it is just as slow. The slides come up fine. It just takes 30 seconds to launch a Powerpoint Show. Obviously, this does not work well. I switched to timed Word files as a stopgap. They work fine but obviously do not have the capabilities of Powerpoint. We are running on Dell Optiplex GX620 machines (dual core Intel processors), so it is not the workstations.

    I am inquiring to see if there is some setting in Powerpoint that may speed up things. I turned off the silly default of ending on a black slide.

  4. #4
    jarvis24 Blair Jarvis, Administrator
    While we try to figure this out, a short term fix might be to use an Executable item rather than the PowerPoint item.

    For your Executable item, enter powerpnt.exe as the file name. For the parameter value, try:

    (c/s "C:\MediaLab\Samples\Sample1\intro.pps")

    Where you substitute the path of your pps file.