Difficulty quitting playing panos

I had not noticed this before I was giving a demo to a realtor on the phone, then tried it myself - it is difficult to 'quit' a pano once it has started playing. None of the close features on the computer seem to function. I imagine it's just a delay (similar to loading a pano) but of course people keep loading on the commands and the computer gets overloaded or freezes up and even then Ctrl-Alt-Delete doesn't do anything and a forced shut-down is necessary. Any ideas about how to avoid this or explain it?
Thanks,

Hamish.

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Permalink Reply by Alan Pinstein on July 6, 2010 at 9:47pm
I have never heard or seen this before.

I can believe that for brief moments this might be true - Flash can really take over a system if it is low on memory as the OS tries to find memory for the system, and the browser will appear hung while that is going on.

Other than that, I am able to close the tour windows with no problem on Mac and PC in any browser.
Permalink Reply by Hamish Tear on July 6, 2010 at 11:49pm
Interesting...The realtor asked me why she couldn't close it down and I waited until finally she had hang up and shut off her computer. (And unfortunately she didn't get back to me yet). So I tried it for myself...on a different tour with an auto-playing pano running. I tried to close it and nothing happened until I had to shut the computer down myself.

But then - I had all sorts of other photographic processes going on on my computer at the same time. So did she possibly in the middle of a work day. I tried it just now with nothing else open - and it closed no problem. Oh well - worth exposing these little things if they come up I suppose. Thank you, Hamish.
Permalink Reply by Alan Pinstein on July 7, 2010 at 12:07am
Browsers also crash very often for many, many reasons.

Ctl-alt-delete and/or task manager should *eventually* work on any modern OS (Win XP, Win 2000, Win 7, Vista, Mac OS X, Linux). However if the computer is swapping heavily sometimes even the task manager can become unresponsive.

When computers seem "hung" I always try to listen for the hard drive or look at the hard drive light. In fact on my computer I have a special indicator installed that tells me if the hard drive is extremely busy. If there is a lot of activity on the hard drive, then likely the computer is busy swapping. You do not need to (and frankly should not, due to risk of data corruption) shut off a computer in this state. You just need to wait. Maybe 1-2 minutes, maybe 5-10 minutes. Wait until the hard drive is no longer constantly active and at that point the computer should be responsive. Try not to even use the computer during this time, as each time you do something you make the situation take longer to resolve itself.

The computer I work on daily has episodes like this frequently (10+ times a day). And I even have 3GB of RAM. Unfortunately software on today's computers is very RAM-hungry and people leave many of them open at the same time and thus this "unresponsiveness due to virtual memory swapping" is a common occurrence.

Since this isn't a PC support forum and I don't want it to turn into one, I will leave it at that.
Permalink Reply by Hamish Tear on July 7, 2010 at 10:38am
Thanks Alan,

Good to address this when we photographers demand so much from our computers - and also what to tell likely clients if they are having that issue.

And remember the old rule: "Never let a computer know you are in a hurry."

Hamish

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