Are these project files on a network LAN or your local hard drive.

If you are trying to work on Captivate project files that are saved on a network LAN drive, move them onto your local hard drive.  Not only should your save times come down markedly, but you also won't be risking disaster from corrupted projects.

Hi all

Hopefully Rod won't mind my offering an analogy here. It's one I've developed to explain to my class participants why a network drive is a bad idea.

Imagine that Captivate is like working in your kitchen. In Captivate, we have all sorts of objects we insert and use. When we are ready, we compile a SWF or create a Video that contains all the elements we have added. That action is very similar to mixing ingredients in the kitchen and baking a cake or a pie.

Normally, when we work in our kitchen and create a dish, if we need to add an ingredient, or put the mixing bowl aside for a short while, we open our fridge or our pantry and grab the ingredient. And if the bowl needs time to sit, it may need to be refrigerated. So we open the fridge and insert the bowl.

Now the Fridge and the Pantry are our real world equivalent of a local hard drive. I have immediate access to either. And the real world equivalent to a network server is the grocery store.

Sure, if I want, I can keep all my ingredients as well as that chilled mixing bowl at the grocery store. But it means that if I need to add an ingredient, I have to stop what I'm doing, get in my vehicle, drive to the store, purchase the ingredient, drive back home, then add the ingredient. Lots of delay there. In network terms, we call that "latency". And it's precisely that latency that is our culprit here and why we always advise against working this way.

With the "driving to the store" analogy, if my mixing bowl is on the counter, my large dog might put her paws up on the counter and knock the bowl over. That would corrupt the process, no? Or in the process of bringing the egg back from the store, it might be dropped or banged into something else and render it unusable. These are the examples of corruption.

So the question is, are you comfortable with the delays and slow operation and possible corruption or do you want to work efficiently? It's totally your choice.

Cheers... Rick

I'm running Cp6 as both 64bit and 32bit on my 3 yr old DELL Studio 1737 laptop (64bit).  It has a T9550 chip @ 2.66 Ghz and 8 Gig of RAM.

So far it's running fine and doesn't appear to use more than a couple of hundred megs of RAM.  But your mileage may differ...