Almost there

I've been working a lot on the wedding pictures for Laura and Lee using Serif PagePlus to put the album together. I had considered using Quark XPress but I need to spend more time with that program before using it for something like this.

PagePlus is clever because it allows you to insert pictures without having to embed them in the file. Instead it creates links to the picture files on the hard drive which keeps the PagePlus file small. As you create more pages though the program slows down and with 36 pages completed linking over 500Mbs of pictures it was crashing. Athough my computer has 1Gb of physical memory it was running out of steam. Even the page file that Windows uses was full.

So I've split the PagePlus file into two with pages 1-18 in one new file and 19-36 in another. Even so the second file is slow to load because those pages have the most photographs on them. It looks like I might have to split the files again to print them otherwise I will end up with huge print spooler files which will crash either the computer or the printer.

The irony is that my first proper computer (an Apple Classic II) had 4Mb of physical memory which I thought was more than enough for any task. I understand that to run the new Windows Vista OS 1Gb is recommended. That means that for any serious graphic work you'd need at least 2Gbs or possibly even 4Gbs if you were producing video or a wedding album like I am. That is 1,048,576 times as much memory as that little Apple computer.