Sluggish performance, would additional ram help or need new mb/cpu

[bhays]

I have a jukebox setup with 17" elo touchscreen in a kiosk case.  I was running Albumplayer on it and have moved to etouch.

Because of the design of the kiosk case, it requires a mini-itx motherboard which limits hardware options.  I have a 1.8Ghz Dual Core processor in it with 2GB Ram running Windows XP with etouch and Airfoil to transmit to an AppleTV in my stereo rack.  The machine is extremely sluggish, taking several seconds sometimes from pressing on an album to the next page..

The only thing I can really upgrade in the case it's in is the Ram to 4GB. Is this likely to solve the problem or should I plan on building a larger case for the project and going to a desktop board?  In that event I would go to a dual monitor setup, etc.

What is the suggested hardware for a really zippy touch screen setup?  I couldn't find it anywhere on the forums or the web site.  Thanks.

[Barcrest]

That spec should be more than enough, is it the album paging you are finding slow? Do you have smaller covers created? I have it running on a P4 and it's more than usable. I suspect you are using large album covers and the loading of those is slowing things down.

[bhays]

I have not gone through and resized them all.  What sizes are recommended?

I suspected it was graphics related because putting it in full screen mode makes the problem much more pronounced.

[Barcrest]

Your coversmall.jpg should be aroun 170x170 with 400x400 being fine for the larger cover.jpg... I tend not to worry about the cover.jpg as this is not loaded as frequently and only one of them will be loaded at any one time. Try creating your smaller coversmall.jpg's at 170 x 170 and you should find it pages fine. This has been covered a fair bit on these forums.

[bhays]

Your coversmall.jpg should be aroun 170x170 with 400x400 being fine for the larger cover.jpg... I tend not to worry about the cover.jpg as this is not loaded as frequently and only one of them will be loaded at any one time. Try creating your smaller coversmall.jpg's at 170 x 170 and you should find it pages fine. This has been covered a fair bit on these forums.

And am I correct that selecting the option to generate thumbnail images when generating or updating the library will take care of making the coversmall.jpg from the cover.jpg in each directory?

[ecbrad]

Correct as long as you don't change the default size values.

FYI to confirm I run E-Touch on much lower specs than yours without issue.

Cheers,
Brad

[bhays]

I have been doing some reading on the forums and it looks like my wireless network connection to the jukebox machine may be the culprit. I believe the reason AlbumPlayer didn't give me a problem is that the software stored a copy of the album covers on a local drive.

The performance is fine as far as playing the music files, just paging through the album covers seems to be the issue.  I have a SAN with raid drives where I would really like to keep my music store.

I saw a thread about a year ago requesting that the album cover files (a copy) could be stored locally on the jukebox machine with the music remaining on the server.  Is this something that was being considered?  I believe it would make my setup work fine.

Thanks

[Barcrest]

If you don't have the smaller covers then it will not be as quick. I believe album player would have scaled down the covers when it made it's local copy of them. All you need to do is alter the covers on the first few pages of albums and test it. As the smaller covers have a different filename (Usually coversmall.jpg) your original covers don't need to be changed. So if you add a small cover to the first 30 or 40 albums you should see what the paging is like when changing the first couple of pages. If this doesn't work for you let us know... I did see sluggish performance when using wireless a while back but on a wired network it was fine.