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header image Skill Level: Beginner
Author:  Merlene Guldager
Home Page: Gold Acres Designs
Software:PhotoImpact Version 7 or higher

Are you tired of PhotoImpact crashing just when you are at a critical place or getting ready for that final save...?
Maximize your Virtual Memory and it will become a thing of the past!
PhotoImpact uses up a lot of your computer's resources to display all the images and changes you make to them. One way is by storing them temporarily in a special file. This tutorial will show you how to increase the size of the file and prevent the majority of future crashes.

Let's Begin

  1. With PhotoImpact open go to File/Preferences/General/
  2. Click on System
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  3. Where it says "Limit hard disk usage to:" click on this button image and increase it as high as it will go. 23472 MB is the max.
  4. Do the same for the "Limit RAM usage to:"
  5. Now look at the area just above where you see something like this..
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    As you can see there are four areas, one is already defined and three are blank.
  6. Click on each of the image buttons at the end of each line. This is a browse button. Use it to browse to your hard drive and create a folder called Extra VM.
  7. Open this new folder and create three more inside it. Naming each vm1, vm2, vm3 respectively.
  8. For each of the other two blank lines you can just browse to the Extra VM folder and select vm2 and vm3.
  9. Now Close PhotoImpact to save this information. If you don't do this, and it crashes again before you close it down you will have lost this information and the crashing will continue.

Ok, that's it. This won't prevent all the crashes if you don't have a lot of RAM.
Also be aware that some Fonts, especially dingbats, use a huge amount of memory to display and can crash not only PhotoImpact, but your whole Operating System forcing a reboot. The best way to prevent this kind of crash is to close as many programs as possible before working with 'heavy' fonts.

© 2008 Gold Acres Designs