Too much Freezing

[Hamlen]

Hi:

I am using Alice to teach two blocks of begining programing to 60 grade 9-11 high school students. Alice is wonderful and the students are engaged! However, the students encounter too many situations where the computer seems to freeze up and they need to restart Alice or even restart the computer. Questions:

1. Anyone else having this problem?
2. Is it my students, the computer hardware, or Alice 2.0?
3. Will the "slow and steady" Alice help cure this problem?
4. What is the downside of the slow and steady Alice?

Any suggestions on how to minimize this freezing will be helpful.

thanks!

[lanceA]

I run Alice 2.0 using a minimum of 512 meg of ram and sometimes there would be freeze-up. We just upped all machines to 1 gig and so far we have not encountered any problems. Also you might wish to have all students reboot the workstations at the end of each class, this can free up memory for the next class since Alice doesn't always release its memory when the program closes.

I don't know if the Slow-and-Steady version will help with the memory issue, I tend to think it is for slower processors, hence the name Slow-and-Steady. It certainly wouldn't hurt to try it though.

Good luck,

[gabe]

Like lanceA said, more memory is definitely better. 512MB should work fine. 1GB is even better. If you students use large sound files and/or lots of objects, that will slow down Alice over time. What are the specs of your machines?

Slow and Steady Alice is meant for older PCs with little video card memory. Alice will run, as the title says, slowly. World won't run as fluidly as normal Alice. I believe it uses software rendering instead of hardware.