PowerPoint and memory usage

[r21]

I'm doing a Power Point with what will wind up being around 250
slides, each containing a single jpg (sized so the original jpg file
is around 60k in size). It's probably going to run on a borrowed
laptop with 256 meg of memory (my own computer runs Windows 2000 and
has 512 meg of memory).

I was running the show while having the Windows Task Manager in the
foreground on my computer (the one with 512 meg of memory). With each
advancing slide, the Powerpoint memory usage increased by about 2-3k,
until around 300k total, when it went down to 30k and began to
increase again by 2-3k per slide. No noticeable interruption to the
show when the used memory was released.

Two questions:

1. Based on what I've said, should this thing be expected to run okay
on a machine with 256 meg of memory, rather than the 512 meg my
development machine does?

2. What is "safer" in terms of running the show - saving the work as a
..pps file (that's what I was running with the experiment above) and
running that, or opening the .ppt file and running it from there?

 

[Guest]

Hello:

When you convert the file or save it as pps the powerpoint compile the file
so it gets compressed.

Regards.

 

[Sonia]

Not true. A PPS file is identical to a PPT file. The only difference is the
file extension. The "S" tells Windows to open it in PowerPoint in "Show" mode.

With less memory you'll probably see a difference in performance because
PowerPoint will need to do more paging. The best thing is to test it on the
target machine.
--

Sonia Coleman
Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Team
Autorun Software, Templates and Tutorials
http://www.soniacoleman.com

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

I'm doing a Power Point with what will wind up being around 250
slides, each containing a single jpg (sized so the original jpg file
is around 60k in size).

With JPGs, the size in k isn't meaningful. Think pixels. The image should be
sized so that it matches your screen resolution for full screen images (ie, if
you're running at 1024x768, that's the size your images should be ideally;
smaller if you really need to keep size down).

1. Based on what I've said, should this thing be expected to run okay
on a machine with 256 meg of memory, rather than the 512 meg my
development machine does?

Probably so, as long as you don't need it to flip from one slide to the next
extremely fast.

2. What is "safer" in terms of running the show - saving the work as a
..pps file (that's what I was running with the experiment above) and
running that, or opening the .ppt file and running it from there?

The formats are identical. Just the extensions change to tell PowerPoint
itself to deal with them a bit differently. It's just possible that PPT may
load a few less bits when you launch a PPS than when you open a PPT for editing
and so use a fraction less memory. A bit of thumping with TaskManager should
tell you more about that. I'd probably make it PPS just because it's easier to
start the show quickly.