Q. A friend of mine made a great DVD movie of digital pictures with transition effects and sound, and it could be played on any DVD player, TV and of course, a computer. He did it with an Apple computer. Is there a comparable program we PC users can use?
Byron Zuidema @hotmail.com
A. Because Apple’s video-making and DVD-burning tools are built into the Mac OS X operating system, the closest thing to a built-in for Windows XP users is the Movie Maker program that you can find by clicking on Start, All Programs, then Accessories and, finally, Entertainment.
While designed mostly for making home movies using digital camcorders, Movie Maker can produce very credible slide shows if one simply imports photos instead of video clips. The soundtrack feature works as well so you can use any MP3 or WMV tune by dragging its icon.
Far better, however, is a $20 program from Microsoft called Plus Digital Media Edition for Windows XP. It includes a fine program for creating these kinds of customized slide-show CDs and DVDs. It does a great job of automatically creating passable shows with synchronized soundtracks and rudimentary zooming reminiscent of TV documentaries with old people, old buildings and banjos for background music.
The slide-show tool lets a user import as many digital photos as desired and then creates titling, transitions and background music. Or the optional automatic module will grab all of the pictures in a specified folder and create an entire show with transitions, zooms and music. Take a gander at Microsoft.com/plus.
Beyond this, if you’re really serious about slide show-making, I’d point to the $50 VideoWave 7 software from Sonic Solutions at Roxio.com, a program that really lays on the special effects for making movie-like slide shows out of photographs. A unique system of drawing boxes and then moving them about over a photo lets users simulate camera sweeps like pros do with costly gear known as animation stations.
Q. Early next year I will be moving to Japan for a year to teach English. I want to get a laptop to take with me, but I went to art school. I find the tech specs to be, well, confusing.
What I am looking for is a laptop that will allow me to access wireless Internet in Japan and to run my QuarkXPress for Windows. Ideally, I want to create a blog to which I can post pictures and prose about my experiences in Tokyo.
What machine(s) would you recommend I look at? I trust you, certainly far more than I trust the sales guy at the big box electronics store.
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” –Groucho Marx
Will Moschke @gmail.com
A. Groucho, whom you quote in the signature line of your e-mail, also said that he’d never belong to any club that would make him a member.
I’m that way when asked to recommend expensive stuff. I’d never buy anything that Coates would recommend. That said, I recommend that you give serious thought to a couple of options, one from Toshiba and another from Fujitsu, just because they are easily serviced in Japan.
Beyond that, the best advice is to let price or size be your guide after making sure that the laptop you pick either runs on Intel’s mobile Centrino chips with built-in wireless or some other 802.11b/g gear.
Buyers don’t need to worry so much about power, because the computer industry is languishing in a plateau that has lasted for more than a year because almost all computer hardware now available is more than powerful enough to handle almost any software thrown at it.
That leaves other questions, particularly economy and comfort.
For economy, Toshiba’s M30X-S171ST notebook is $599 on its Web site, Toshiba.com. This machine meets every one of your goals, including running that memory-intensive QuarkXPress publishing software.
Because schlepping laptops remains the bane of road warriors, let me suggest something like the $1,499 Lifebook T4000 Tablet PC notebook from Fujitsu. You are an artist and may like the idea of owning a pen-capable computer that make things like fine-tuning art in Quark or Photoshop much easier. I can tell you from experience it rocks with a folding keyboard so easy to use that you’ll find yourself dozing off with the small computer propped on your chest like a hardcover book, which weighs just about as much and is only a tad smaller. This 9.5-by-11.5-inch model with a 12-inch diagonal screen can be found at Fujitsu.com.
Q. I have just finished helping my daughter load all of her software on her new Dell laptop. Now she is going off to college. I would love to back up her system with the DVD burner, so that if she ran into trouble, she could restore a DVD and bring her laptop to the same condition it was before she left home. A DVD with the operating system and software and another with data and music, and voila, she would be back in business in a short time.
By contrast, a system restore of XP takes about 45 minutes. Then another 30 or so to restore necessary drivers. Then you have to load the specialty software for the burner, antivirus, etc.
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I am a bit leery of the Ghost software for this from Symantec.
Mel Otero @wi.rr.com
A. Let’s not give up completely on the $69.95 Ghost computer mirroring software from Symantec, because this software giant has assimilated into the latest Ghost code what had been a better product, Drive Image from PowerQuest. My tests of Ghost have worked OK, but I must say there were some white-knuckle moments counting on fragile DVDs.
Before deciding on Ghost, you ought to consider a competing product–Acronis True Image 8.0–because, unlike Ghost, it can be downloaded in demo/test form at Acronis.com, which will let you see if you like it.
The biggest complaints voiced over using discs in drive image schemes is that the DVDs are prone to miswrites, damage and glitches. Consider how many dud CDs you have burned.
If you are willing to shell out a bunch more to get a bunch more, consider an external USB 2.0 hard drive like Maxtor’s One Touch in the $200 to $250 range. This works with Ghost and True Image to hold mirror data instead of using plastic discs.
If you were using a desktop instead of a laptop, you could buy a less expensive hard drive and install it in your daughter’s computer and then make a clone with Ghost or True Image. Then when the computer gets messed up you–or she–could just change the settings to boot from the standby drive.
This is cheaper but you only get one chance at backup unless you go back and reformat the old and corrupted drive and then make a clone of the former clone on it.
No wonder we’re so confused about all the cloning talk.
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Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at [email protected] or via snail mail at the baiduhai, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60611. Questions can be answered only through this column. Add your point of view at chicagotribune.com/askjim.