File Conversion Center requires the appropriate applications be installed on your system to handle associated file conversions. For example, Microsoft Office 2003 or higher is required for converting Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, Ghostscript is required for converting PostScript files, Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher is required for converting HTML files, and Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Ghostscript is required for converting PDF files. Note, however, that you do not need additional applications installed on your system to convert files TO PDF format.

Converting documents to raster images places great demands on both the CPU and memory. The amount of memory required to process an image is directly proportional to both the dimensions (paper size) and the resolution (DPI, or Dots Per Inch) of the image.

As an example of the amount of memory involved, consider a standard 8.5" X 11" document printed in color at 600 DPI. In order to perform any of the operations listed above, the entire image must first be loaded into memory. The calculation of the amount of memory required is:

memory required = (number of pixels in image) X (number of bytes per pixel)

The total number of pixels in an image is equal to the (width of the image X the horizontal resolution) X (height of the image X vertical resolution). Furthermore, each pixel in a full color image uses 3 bytes to store color information. Our calculation therefore expands to:

memory required = (8.5 X 600) X (11 X 600) X 3 = 100980000 bytes = 96.3Mb

No less than 96 megabytes of memory is required to hold the image in memory. If this much physical memory (RAM) is not available for the printing process, Windows will use virtual memory. The resultant I/O (reading/writing) operations to and from the hard disk significantly slows down the entire process.

Although there are no minimum requirements (except that virtual memory must be enabled) for using File Conversion Center to process full color images, the following are the minimum requirements in order to achieve real-time processing of an 8.5" X 11" image in full color (no swapping to disk).

 

If you encounter heavy disk activity during the printing process, and find that the process as a whole takes an inordinately long time to complete, you can remedy the situation in any of the following ways (choose one):

1.Lower the resolution.

2.Print in black and white.

3.Disable all of the driver options listed above.

4.Decrease the paper size.

5.Add more memory (RAM).