This page contains buttons that take you to one of the advanced preference pages. These settings are for advanced users who need precise control over various operations. Warning: Improper use of these settings can cause PMIO to run slowly or use excessive amounts of disk space and memory.
Preferences - Disk Page
These preferences allow you to control some aspects of how PMIO uses your disk storage.
Preferences - Disk Page
- Database Manager launches the Database Manager dialog.
- Volume Manager launches the Volume Manager dialog.
- Enable floppy allows the use of the specified floppy disk drive with PMIO.
- Write-protect these drives allows you to specify the drive letters of any drives that you want PMIO to write-protect. This is useful if you have a CD writing device attached to your computer. By entering its drive letter here you can prevent PMIO from trying to store files on your writable CDs.
Preferences - Cache Page
PMIO allows many thumbnails to be loaded at the same time and shares thumbnail imagery and file information between different parts of the program. In order to facilitate this, and to increase the speed of the program, it maintains a memory cache of information about all the images that are in use. In addition to this, memos, catalogue information and database information are also cached for performance reasons. The Cache Preferences page gives you control over when these caches are purged (i.e. emptied), and thus allows you to control the program's overall performance and memory consumption.
Preferences - Cache Page
- Cache uncompressed bitmaps... - PMIO keeps thumb imagery in memory in JPEG format. This considerably reduces the amount of memory required by the program. When the time comes to display the thumbs, it converts the JPEG data to a simple bitmap format which Windows can paint on the screen. This conversion takes a little time, which means there is a noticeable delay when the thumbnail panel is displayed or scrolled. You can check this option to force PMIO to cache the uncompressed data in memory so that the conversion only has to be done once. This can use a lot of memory but it speeds up performance considerably. Depending on your processor speed and memory availability you might like to experiment with this option and see if it helps PMIO’s performance on your system.
- When to purge unused items from memory - PMIO maintains a memory cache of thumbnail information and imagery which allows it to share the information among different parts of the program. The information for a whole location of images can be held in memory even after that location has long been forgotten by the user. This increases performance next time that location is opened during the same PMIO session, but uses up precious memory. You can use these radio buttons to choose when PMIO should discard unused data that is still in the cache.
- The first option removes the information from memory as soon as it is no longer in use.
- The second option allows you to specify a maximum number of items that can be in memory at the same time before PMIO starts removing unused ones.
- The third option allows you to specify approximately how much memory the whole cache is allowed to use.
You can force PMIO to purge the cache at any time by clicking the Purge Now [1] button. - Catalogue Cache - PMIO caches catalogue information in memory for performance reasons. You can force it to purge this cache at any time by clicking the Purge Now [2] button.
- Memo Cache - PMIO caches memos in memory for performance reasons. You can force it to purge this cache at any time by clicking the Purge Now [3] button.
- Database Cache - PMIO caches database information in memory for performance reasons. You can force it to purge this cache at any time by clicking the Purge Now [4] button.
Preferences - Thumb Page
These settings control the creation of the internal base thumbs from which all visible thumbs are derived. Any changes that you make here will cause your thumbs to be recreated from the source images, and will affect the size of the thumbnail database, and the overall speed of the program.
- The General tab contains controls for changing the width, height, sharpness and quality of the base thumbs. These controls are similar to the controls on the Thumbnail Appearance window.
- The JPEG tab contains controls for adjusting the JPEG quality of the base thumbs. This page works in the same way as the standard JPEG page.
- Bug:
- After modifying this option, occasionally some thumbs do not appear to take on the new settings. I am still trying to track this bug down.
- See also:
- The Preferences Dialog