Best Laptop for Adobe Captivate

[Chelz.101]

Hi,

I wanted to people's opinion on what would be the ideal laptop to use Adobe Cativate. I've been using Captivate for over a year and it always seems to slow down my laptop. I know it's the file or the cache as I am consistenly clearly it out. I had to adjust a lot of the programs on my computer that would run in th background and turn them off while I am in Captivate, such as MS Teams. Today it was particularly slower than normal and was propmted by my laptop that it turn off other programs to adjust the storage. My laptop is faily new, only 2 years old. It's a Lenovo running on i5 Intel Core Processor, 64-bit, 8 GB of Ram, Windows 10 Pro.

[RodWard]

That laptop should be fine to run Captivate 2019. More RAM would not hurt, but Captivate does not usually use more than a couple of Gig of RAM unless your projects are very large.  How large are your CPTX files?

Cleaning out the cache after you finish each project is always a good idea.  But one of the main reasons Captivate runs slowly is because many users don't realise they should never work on project files that are stored on a network drive.  CPTX files should always be downloaded to your local hard drive BEFORE you open them with Captivate, and save and close from Captivate before reuploading to the network backup location. Is that the way you always work, or do you open files from the network?

Set up special folders at the C drive root level (not inside your My Documents folder) and set these folders up as your Default Locations for Project Publish folder and Project Cache folder.  Have you done this?

[Chelz.101]

Thank you for your quick response. 

The file is actually very small. I just began the project. Only 3 slides in. I've worked on large files and have experienced slow downs but not to the degree I experience today and the last few days.

As for where I store the files, I store it on my desktop and back it up to my company's network drive and my OneDrive weekly. I realized very early on about this issue.

I was thinking maybe I may just need more RAM. This is a corporate issued laptop. I do have other programs installed on here that may just be taking up space.

[Stagprime]

I have been using Captivate since version 3 - several years - several computers.

I can honestly say that I do not recall needing to perform the whole cache clean or preferences clean thing.

For many years, I used to work as a network admin and did some home computer work on the side. Hands down - my largest computer service was helping with the "slow computer".

Majority of the time - running some virus scans and clean up utilities - deleting browser extensions or other programs/services that simply didn't belong or were added  without the users knowledge, disabling startup programs and services among some other things was enough to get the system running like new.

I am hesitant to claim that Captivate is the culprit here. While it may make some demands on a system, I personally don't believe those demands to be crippling to your system on their own. Rather it is the accumulation of other junk over time that crowds out and hinders the performance of other legitimate programs. I have found that malware and other garbage are by far the largest contributor to the slow computer.

I have run Captivate on lesser systems than you have just fine but I am extremely judicious about sites I visit and things I click on or install to my computer.

A good tech should be able to look at your laptop and examine the other things that are running in the background that shouldn't be and get rid of them.

I know this does not quite answer your question but I do think it is a step towards solving your problem which my gut says it is due to other garbage software not Captivate.

That is where I would start - have a good cleaning/tune up done.

From a hardware standpoint - If you have an extra slot in the laptop - I would toss in an additional 8 GB stick of RAM as it is a relatively inexpensive, yet noticeable performace upgrade.

[Chelz.101]

Thank you! I suspect that it's not Captivate either but it only really ocurs when I run Captivate. My IT department did a tune up not too long ago (less than 2 months ago).

However, not sure if my laptop has another slot for RAM and my manager is onboard with my laptop being too slow as he's seen it run slow and was surprised I have been dealing with it. I just wanted to make sure with people that have been using Captivate way longer than myself and see if this issue has occured in past with someone else.

Again thank you!

[RodWard]

One thing I have found that makes a huge difference is the hard drive itself.  Captivate benefits greatly from having a fast SSD drive instead of a spinning disk drive.  Some years agon on one of my previous laptops I replaced the aging disk drive with a Samsung EVO SSD and was amazed at the performance improvement.  Nowadays I only use SSDs.  

This might not be possible for you to request, but worth asking your IT department as it's not an expensive upgrade nowadays.

[Chelz.101]

Thanks! I complete forgot about SSD drive. Years ago, I had one put in my personal laptop and the poor thing runs amazing still. I may recommend to my employer plus it's a cheaper alternative to a new laptop.