If you’re giving a presentation and you don’t have the option of using a “show machine” provided by your AV company or the event organisers, then there are a few things you should do to prepare your laptop for use in a production environment.

Disable everything
Most people use their laptop for e-mail, instant messaging, downloading files, syncing their mobile phone and PDA, watching movies, playing games, speech recognition, and so on – all of these activities require software, much of which loads itself, or its helper applications into memory so that it can run in the background, launch more quickly, or provide notices and messages without manual interaction. Not only do all of these things take up valuable memory, CPU power, and hard disk access, but they also run the risk of popping up during your presentation and distracting you and your audience.Disable power management and screen savers

The last thing you want to have in the middle of your keynote speech is a screensaver with your family photos popping up over the top of your PowerPoint slides. You should run through and make sure all the screen savers and “lock computer” (or password protect) options are disabled, and that your system is set to “never” stand by, or turn off its screen or hard disks.

Prepare well for video
Playing video files embedded into a PowerPoint presentation isn’t ever smooth sailing. For starters, it requires a powerful computer to load and play the embedded object on demand – you will usually notice a significant delay that can worry or bore your audience.

What’s more, most laptop graphics cards aren’t capable of displaying the video on both the external display (your data projector or similar) and your laptop’s screen – so don’t be surprised if either you, or your audience aren’t able to see the video.

If you do choose to embed video into your presentation, make sure you inform the event organisers if they will need to provide sound output for your laptop, and then disable all your system sounds to prevent interruptions during the show.

Check your versions
If you create your presentation on a different computer to the one you intend to play it from, make sure you test it on the “show computer” – don’t just assume it will work – often there will be different versions of PowerPoint, different screen resolutions or graphics cards, different fonts, and various other factors that can prevent your show machine from displaying the presentation as intended.Run off hard diskA USB drive, floppy disk, or CD-ROM will not be the most reliable or the fastest option – PowerPoint will load up each slide as it’s advanced to, rather than preloading them – which means if your presentation isn’t stored on the hard disk, you could notice a delay in the time it takes to pull up a slide – particularly one with video or photos embedded. What’s more, a hard disk is more reliable than removable mediums – it’s possible you have a scratched CD, demagnetized floppy disk, or that you bump the USB drive and knock it out of the port.

Profile it
If you want to keep all of your normal settings intact, but still want a successful presentation, consider creating a separate user profile on your laptop for presentations, – which can be set up with the ideal settings for a presentation, but will not affect things like your screen saver and start-up programs for normal use.