Presenter '13 - slow response time

I had the some problem back around the time of the first Studio 13 update. Running the update fixed the problem. Not sure if this will work for you, assuming you haven't run all the updates.

Thanks - but I double checked and I have all of the updates installed. On top of it being slow, I just lost the audio for the course for the second time today! And I don't have any "backup" files in the same folder which I know caused that problem in the past. Very frustrating to say the least...

Hi Leslie!

Be sure that you are working locally on your hard drive.

If Articulate Studio '13 isn't working properly, a simple repair may fix the problem. Here's how.

Since you mentioned an issue with your audio, you may want to check out this article as well.

I've been running Presenter 13 on PP10 without difficulties. I just upgraded to PP13 today and I'm having some major speed problems, too. On my first publish of a project it progresses at a "normal" speed. But if I immediately publish again, it moves along at a glacial pace. This is a problem I can't live with as is. 

Anyone else seeing this issue - fine with PP10, but horrifically slow with PP13?

And Leslie, I'll look at that repair link you provided. Thanx.

I tried the fix Leslie suggested. At first I thought it was fixed. I did several publishes at normal speed.

But... after doing some editing, the problem reappeared. I first tried to Preview one slide. That took 3-4 minutes to render. After that I tried a publish and that took about 20 minutes (there are 8 fairly simple slides in the presentation).

I may have to try to dredge up a copy of PP 10 and downgrade back to that.

Hi Russ! 

Publishing time may also depend on what is on each of your slides (E.g. a lot of videos, images, audio, etc.) that will impact the publishing time. Can you confirm that your system requirements meet those specified in this link?

If you're still having difficulty, I'd also try to close out other programs when going to publish your Presenter files, just to check that there isn't anything else running in the background and taking up memory. 

Hi All,

I'm having the same speed problems Leslie and Russ reported. In my opinion, there's something significantly corrupted that's making Presenter crawl, but I haven't figured out what it is.

It takes four minutes to launch the Audio Editor, and 32 minutes to publish. Arghh!

I would gladly upload the PPTX and PPTA files (nothing proprietary in there yet), if the good folks at Articulate want to conduct an autopsy.

Environment:

• Relatively simple presentation, nine slides, no video, just animated graphics and an audio track. No Quizmaker or Engage content (yet).
• Didn't experience the glacial performance until I added the audio track. That is, publishing before adding audio took
• PPTX file is 16MB, PPTA file is 5MB.
• Did have one "-old.ppta" file, but that was long after the problem started, and probably due to an aborted Publish run. It was deleted, but that didn't fix the problem..
• PowerPoint 2013 has no performance problems.
• Presenter has no performance problems after the Audio Editor is loaded. That is, it works fine for editing, but loading and saving take way too long.
• Windows 8.1 on a 6-month old HP Envy laptop. Plenty of horsepower, optimized, no background resource hogs.
• PowerPoint 13, 32-bit version. PowerPoint 2007 is still installed, but Microsoft indicates the two don't share any files.
• Studio 13 30-day evaluation version was installed on 05/04/2014.

Troubleshooting:

• I've been through all the steps recommended in this post and the links. That includes re-installing studio-13.exe.
• Tried compressing pictures and media in PPT, that brought it down to 10MB. No change in Presenter performance.
• I moved the presentation out of a Google Drive synched folder to a standard folder on my local HD, no synching, no encryption -- no improvement.
• "Audio Editor >> CTRL+A  >> DEL >> Save". No more audio. Down to three minutes to re-launch the Audio Editor, and 21 minutes to Publish. Again, Arghh!

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

...Ron

For any performance-related issues on a PC, including those described in this thread, I'd also consider doing some regular PC/Windows maintenance, if you've not yet done so.

For example, I'd run CCleaner (free, here: https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner) both to eliminate temporary files and to clean the registry.

I'd also run Malwarebytes (free, here: https://www.malwarebytes.org/) to ensure that there's no hidden malware that could be affecting system performance.

I hope this helps!

Hi Dave et al.,

Are you ready for a bizarre solution? This one freaked me out, because after almost 30yrs of PC troubleshooting, I thought I’d gotten close to having seen everything. Apparently not.

--- Skip to the end of this post if you just want the final solution.

You might be on the right track with the PC/Windows maintenance angle, but I prefer not to run utilities from websites with which I'm not familiar unless it's a last resort. I’m also confident the laptop is optimized and protected, and _everything_ else works fine -- including video editing.

Pursuing my theory of file or index corruption, I started from scratch with all but the slide content. I created a blank PPTX in a new folder with a short path. I then copied the content from each slide in the old PPTX, one at a time. No PPTA yet.

Then I re-did every bit of the Presenter work from scratch. That includes re-booting, re-installing studio-13.exe (again), importing one WAV, splitting it over the nine slides, syncing all animations, adding the glossary and library, setting all the Player options, re-doing the menus and slide titles, and publishing to Flash and HTML5.

Same result --> 4 minutes to load the Audio Editor, and 32 minutes to publish.

Then, it occurred to me to try another project in PowerPoint ‘13 and Presenter ‘13. I don’t happen to have one, so I pulled Dave Anderson’s “Do It Yourself Tire Change” (DIYTC) tutorial from this page: http://community.articulate.com/downloads/p/1608.aspx, and upgraded it to Presenter ‘13.

Very similar file size (18MB), and very similar performance. Bummer.

Then I went into “random” mode. re-booted, restarted PPT, and went for a baseline publish time. Less than two minutes! So I tried to open the Audio Editor, and that took eight seconds! Eureka moment.

Thinking all was right in the world again, I made a few tweaks to the presentation, and started a Publish run. Back to the 32-minute run-time! What’s up with that?

--- HERE IS THE ANSWER: 

If I have the PowerPoint ‘13 Animation Pane and the Selection Pane open when Publishing or launching the Audio Editor in Presenter '13, the performance is 32 minutes and 4 minutes respectively.

If I close those two panes before launching Articulate operations, the performance is two minutes and only eight seconds respectively.

Eureka!! It’s definitely weird, but if that’s the fix, I’ll take it.

...Ron

Interesting, Ron. I'd imagine that having the selection and animation panes takes up some resources, but I wouldn't think it'd be that much.

Perhaps there's something internal to Articulate in this regard ... I'm interested in hearing from the other folks experiencing similar troubles, and whether they can duplicate your findings.

That's a really interesting find, Ron. I keep the animation and selection panes open all the time so that fits in with your discovery. In my case, I gave up on it and deleted PowerPoint '13. I reinstalled PowerPoint'10 and all works fine now. 

Brilliant Ron - this has solved my long load time problem!