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1. Defrag religiously. If you are on an NT workstation, this requires a
third-party plugin. We use Diskeeper, but I'm sure there are others.
Mine is set to run daily on the drives I use most.
2. Have your support folks set up a partition on your hard drive, or
install a separate drive, that you then identify to PhotPaint as your
scratch disk. Leave tons of free space on this disk. Preferably, don't
put any other files on it.
3. When you are getting set to do screen grabs, reboot your machine and
start only the applications you need to capture and process the grabs
(i.e., the application you are documenting and PhotoPaint. Don't start
your browser. Don't start your email client. Don't start Frame. Don't
start Distiller. If those applications start automatically when you
reboot, change the registry settings so they don't.
4. When you actually capture a screen, take a couple of deep breaths
before alt-tabbing to PhotoPaint (give the processor time to catch up
with disk swaps, etc.)
Dick
Curtis Brautigam wrote:
>
> I am working on user manuals that involve a lot of screen captures. I do the
> screen capture and place it in an image processing program (Corel
> PhotoPaint). There I resample it and convert it to JPEG to compress it. What
> has been happening on an increasingly frequent basis is that I place the
> screen capture in the image processing program, and the program freezes up.
> I have to close everything that is running on my computer, save my material
> (in FrameMaker) and then reboot. About a couple of months ago, our IT
> department installed a new video card with increased memory in my computer,
> and it solved the problem for a while. However, it is recurring once again.
> I tried to resample and compress in other programs (PSP, Photoshop) but that
> didn't work.
>
> Does anybody have any ideas what might be causing this problem?
>
>