Family Historian User Group

Just wanted to report this one small glitch I am having while using Gedcom Census. Every now and again, when I attempt to link in images, I manage to lock up the whole works and lose all the data I have just entered.

I suspect the problem is that I am trying to run too many things at once and I am running out of memory. If I'm working on Census entries, I will sometimes have all of these open at once:

1) Family Historian (3.1.2)
2) Gedcom Census
3) IrfanView (3.98 if I recall correctly) to view the downloaded jpegs
4) Firefox 1.5 (with an extension called 'Scrapbook', which allows me to capture pages, so if I am doing a US Census entry with the 'view all neighbors on page' available, I will have captured that -- or I may have the UK info saved from FreeCEN)
5) IE (if I have just captured the image from Ancestry -- their IE-specific viewer is much quicker to use than Firefox, so I typically have both Firefox and IE open at the same time)
6) GenSmarts (if I was using it to cross-check which censuses I was missing)

[oops] ... You get the idea. I'm running an elderly Win98 machine and I don't have a huge amount of RAM.

When things do go badly, it typically takes a long time for the preview bits to 'fill in' and sometimes the whole screen goes almost white, with only the bare outlines of the windows visible. If it is merely sluggish, I can do the 'go off for a cup of coffee' trick and it finishes eventually, but once I get to the 'whiteout' stage it is no use, the whole machine is kaput and I must reboot to recover.

If the information on how I crash the computer might be useful to you, I would be pleased to do some experiments, but if not, I think I will be better off just telling Gedcom Census not to do the linking and to do it myself afterwards in FH, until I can upgrade my hardware.

Other than this one difficulty caused by my rickety old box, I am quite pleased with GC. All my other mishaps are entirely caused by user error -- e.g. charging ahead on an entry with the program set to a UK census when I am entering a US one, or vice-versa -- pointing Gedcom Census at the wrong GEDCOM file -- and the classic newbie mistake of telling FH 'no' when it asks if I want to re-load my file after it has been modified by the other program.
[oops]

How much in the way of system requirements does GC want?

Jan

ID:2401

It is hard to judge exactly the resources that Gedcom Census requires as it will depend on size of your GEDCOM file, etc. but image files can be big and if you have several programs open at the same time with large images displayed and you have an elderly machine with very little memory then you may well hit problems. I've not had any similar reports but then I expect not too many are still using Windows 98.

I used to manage a network of a couple of hundred Windows 98 PCs about 7 years ago (until we upgraded to Windows 2000) and it was never the most stable of operating systems with regular lock-ups and crashes. In contrast the same network now has PCs with Windows XP that sometimes don't get rebooted for several weeks at a time without any noticable problems.

There isn't very much I can do really to fix this for you so I can only suggest trying to cut down the number of applications you run at the same time or upgrade your PC (or at least the memory in it).

Just did a quick test and on my PC with a file of about 1800 people and 600 sources and a picture being attached, GC uses about 30 meg of memory.

The stats:

192 Megabytes Installed Memory

I tend to work in several small files, with only the information I'm sure of kept in the 'master' file. My biggest FH file is 1763 KB, has fewer than 300 individuals, 110 sources.

The biggest census JPEG is 1551KB and if the family is split across 2 pages I would have both images open.

My husband has upgraded the memory in this computer beyond what it came with, and I suspect he thinks he put more in than it actually has. At any rate, he has promised me a new computer 'soon'. The fact that I am still on Win98 may give you a hint about how long it takes him to decide which computer he wants to buy. [wink]

My post was intended more as a cautionary tale for other users who may come after me -- if people are sensible about memory usage on small machines, Gedcom Census still works quite well.

Thanks for your reply.

Jan