Running A Continuous Loop

Earlier in this book we covered how to create looping presentations and we set up a kiosk to run continuously. When running continuous loops , there are some timing issues to be kept in mind:

• The longer the presentation runs, the more timeline deviation it can experience. There isn't much to do about this, it is the nature of the beast .

• Running presentations for longer than 24 hours without restarting the computer can cause a computer crash. The cause is believed to be a memory leak, but this has not been verified . The solution is to restart the program daily using Windows scheduler. If you want information on scheduling a presentation to restart automatically, check out Tushar Mehta's site at http://www. tushar -mehta.com. Scroll down the page to Auto Schedule on the menu of site pages and you'll find his tutorial on auto-scheduling PowerPoint.

• PowerPoint 2002 somehow lost the 5-minute reset clock feature for kiosks and self-running presentations, so a presentation running in PowerPoint 2002 may not reset.. Fortunately, Chirag Dalai has developed a free add-in available from OfficerOne at http:// officerone .tripod.com/kioskassist/kioskassist.html.

It is a good idea to restart the presentation daily. Restarting the presentation resets the time line drift . You may find that continuously looping presentations run more consistently, cause less computer failures and have less problems with sound and animation drifts.