bug

Normally when you get a message "....Eventually, five minutes later, I get this message..." that is because your machine does not have enough RAM to process your program and it is saving all data out to it's virtual memory and THEN, after "...5 minutes", it is telling you something - I need more memory.

I'm not sure how much memory it has not really my computers it's my parents but I'm getting my own soon I know it has a good game card but not sure how much memory.

Wow, people have been busy at the keyboard - hope you all keep it up, Alice needs an active forum. A couple of comments on speed and error messages:

First, there is no question Alice presents a challenge to older machines. I run it a lot on a nearly five year old laptop with a very low end graphics engine - and sometimes that just doesn't cut it. Most recently was when I tried to add a stereo, 16-bit, 44 Khz soundtrack to a short video - the hardware just couldn't do it. Worked fine when I went to 8-bit mono at a lower rate (think it was 16 Khz) and also sounded great on a faster machine.

Typically the problems are - in order - not enough primary memory leading to excessive (and slow) secondary and/or disk accesses, not enough speed and/or video memory in the graphics engine and slow processor speed.

I like to keep the Windows Task Manager open (hit ctrl-alt-del) and monitor the performance in the little window at the bottom of the screen - if it turns solid green, you're pushing the processor too hard.

Also note that this is a problem for 3D processing in general - Alice really does pretty well. I can't even start the demo version of Maya 7 (a high end program) on the old laptop.

Second, if you keep getting error messages, take time to read them. Some of Alice's messages are just warnings, so try to continue. Alice is also picky about what characters it accepts - if that's the problem, it will show up when you click on "details".

The "Shutting Down" message sounds like what I get when my battery is getting low, the Alice save message has never shut me down. The time between messages can also be changed from the Edit>Preferences>Seldom Used menu.

Re Microsoft, I've actually gotten two replies from them - in both cases I was using an outdated .dll file and they sent me a URL for the upgrade. Doesn't happen often, and I wouldn't send a message if you have a reasonable idea of what caused the problem, but it really doesn't cost anything.

Jim