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July 24, 2006

Product Review: NXPowerLite 2.3

Richard Kuper
The Kuper Report
http://TheKuperReport.com

At the recent C3 Expo in NYC I had the chance to meet with Tommy Powell, Sales and Marketing Manager of Neuxpower, the company that makes and markets NXPowerLite (www.nxpowerlite.com). At the conclusion of our conversation he graciously provided a copy of NXPowerLite to review.

The product comes in several flavors:

Integrated Edition:

Install the product, which provides the ability to easily save a powerpoint file in compressed format from within PowerPoint.

Standard Edition:

No installation needed. Just (1) place the program to your desktop, then (2) drag the powerpoint file you want to compress onto the Standard Edition icon.

According to the website there is also a Server Edition.

I decided that I would test the Integrated Edition. Installation was a snap. I then searched for a large powerpoint file on my hard drive and opened it with PowerPoint (XP). The file I chose was 2,164 KB with multiple charts and graphs and was created on another pc by someone else. I then clicked on "File", found the option to "Optimize with NXPowerLite" and clicked. I accepted the default compression and was then asked if I wanted to "flatten embedded objects." What that means, explains NXPowerLite, is:

"Embedded objects (such as Excel charts, Visio drawings or Photoshop images) tend to store far more information than PowerPoint actually requires in order to display them (a Photoshop image will, for example, store all of the layer information that built up during its creation). Flattening an embedded object removes this 'behind the scenes' data, leaving only the information that PowerPoint needs in order to display the object correctly. This drastically reduces the file size, but means that the object will no longer be editable from within PowerPoint. This is why NXPowerLite always asks before flattening an embedded object in a PowerPoint file."

I said OK.

The original file, remember, was 2,164 KB. NXPowerLite reduced it by 77% to 498 KB. I was amazed.

Using a shareware utility, I had previously converted the 2,164 KB ppt file to a PDF file, which resulted in a PDF file of 1,531 KB. So I was curious to see what would happen if I converted this much reduced powerpoint file to a PDF. The new PDF was 976 KB, 36% smaller.

On different sized powerpoint files, with varying types of images and slide trasitions and such I got varying degrees of compression, but all were at least 50% smaller, with no noticeable difference in the resulting presentation on my monitor. However, in cases such as the large file above, there were noticeable and sometimes drastic improvements in how quickly the presentation loaded and displayed the graphics.

I then loaded the Standard Edition to my desktop and dragged a powerpoint file to the icon. It launched the program and essentially worked the same as from within powerpoint.

According to the website, the Standard Edtion is compatible with Windows XP, 2000 and NT. The Integrated Edition is compatible with Windows XP, 2000, NT, ME and 98.

For $45 for a single copy, and even better prices for corporate licenses per user, this is one nifty product that will allow you to bring along many more presentations on a usb thumb drive, for example. And if there is anyone out there still using 3.5" floppy diskettes (stores up to 1.44 MB) you could never have fit the large powerpoint presentation on it, but with NXPowerLite you could now fit two copies on that diskette and still have room for another small file. And for the individual user out there with many powerpoint files and in need of more disk space, just get this product, shrink the files, and free up your hard drive space.



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July 13, 2006

Product Review: VCOM Autosave 2

Richard Kuper
The Kuper Report
http://TheKuperReport.com

Backing up is something everyone should do. Maybe a file will get corrupted or you will accidentally overwrite a file and want to go back to a previous version. Who knows?

VCOM Autosave 2 is included in a whole suite of products from VCOM (http://www.v-com.com) called SystemSuite Professional 6 ($59.95). It is also sold as a stand-alone product for $49.99.

So how does VCOM Autosave 2 fare as a backup and recovery tool?

From the VCOM product website:

"VCOM’s AutoSave gives you a unique, real-time, automatic backup security solution that you simply set up once and forget!"

Well, that part is certainly true. I set it up and then it did its thing.

From the VCOM product website:

"AutoSave ... continuously watches files you’re working on and automatically saves a backup whenever you create or save a file. It can even save multiple 'history' versions of your changed files. Best of all, it does this in the background while you work, without interruption!"

Unfortunately, every time it decided to back stuff up, it ate resources on the pc and sometimes brought the pc to a crawl.

From the VCOM product website:

"[T]he Restore wizard walks users through disaster recovery quickly and easily."

Well, I'm not quite sure what they mean by "quickly and easily." I finally had to try to get a backup version of a file because I had inadvertently written over it and for some reason the software (MS Word) had not made it's own backup copy of this particular file (I have the feature turned on in MS Word). So I started up VCOM's Autosave to try to get the previously backed up copy. This turned out to be an extremely difficult and painful process. I will summarize to spare you the same pain. It took literally hours to drill down to the folder the file was in, and I was unable to do any other work on the pc, as it took up all of the pc's resources. When I finally got to the folder, there was no way to simply select the one file I wanted to copy. The only option was to restore the whole folder. So I first needed to create a new folder to restore to so that no files would be overwritten. And since the files were stored in a proprietary format, I could not simply copy and paste the file I wanted.

In the end I was indeed able to get the file I wanted (and many other files I didn't want), but the time and pain were just too much.

For those wondering, the pc this occurred on has a 2.8G Pentium 4 chip, 160G hard drive, 512K memory, Windows XP Home.



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July 08, 2006

C3 Expo 2006

Richard Kuper
The Kuper Report
http://TheKuperReport.com

Just over a year ago, this newsletter, after 20 something years of being a print-only publication, became an online-only publication. The first article was a brief review of the 2005 C3 Expo. I recently attended the 2006 C3 Expo and I am happy to report that it was a bigger and better show than the 2005 show, and better attended. However, neither the number of booths nor the number of attendees came anywhere close to what such shows once drew. Additionally, there is usually a special side show specifically for the press, and for some reason that was cancelled this year.

This writer is still at a loss as to why these shows have fallen on hard times. Technology still marches on. There are new tools and products and solutions to learn about and consider. The best way to get insight is to see actual demonstrations and talk with the companies providing the products or services. Shows like this are an ideal way to do that. In a compressed time frame one can gather relevant information from multiple vendors/service providers to help in making informed decisions.



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