Hardware Graphics Acceleration for Smooth Transitions

Full-screen fades actually use a lot of computing power, and if you don't have a super powerful machine, you may find animations (and video) acting sluggish: everything from hesitation to start to chunky instead of smooth fades.

There are a number of best practices for presenting such as plugging your computer in, running no other applications and running your presentation from your hard drive as opposed to a network or flash drive. But the simplest "boost" you can give your PowerPoint presentation is to enable "Hardware Graphic Acceleration." 

You can find it under the "Slide Show Tab" under "Set Up Show." By default this is usually unchecked. In theory, this setting travels with the file, but it can easily get unchecked if you crash or for other unknown reasons.

I would only enable this if you are having performance issues as it sometimes can actually cause complex animations or some video to run worse. That's Microsoft for you.

Note that there is also a "Hardware Graphics Acceleration" control for Windows itself which needs to be fiddled with in some cases (such as playing video on IBM Thinkpads.) If you need help with these larger performance issues, just email me and I'll be happy to help where I can.