I went to give a presentation today that I created in the latest version of Keynote (3.0), part of the iWork (‘08) suite from Apple and ran into a problem that looked like this:
I started to think through the troubleshooting on this one: “I have a very new MacBook Pro computer with lots of RAM all over the place – that shouldn’t be a problem. I’m connected to a 2nd display, but I’ve done that a lot, too. My presentation worked fine three weeks ago when I gave it … oh, I’ve installed Leopard since then!”
I have to imagine that’s causing the problem. Leopard must be causing Keynote to display the “your computer may not have enough VRAM” error. I tried changing the display settings, as it suggested and the error continued. I tried mirroring the displays and that didn’t work either.
I found this tech note from Keynote 1.0 and reboote, this time with the second display connected during startup (I normally don’t have a problem adding it while the machine is running). The problem went away.
And now I’ll start looking for a fix. That’s a very un-Apple thing to have happen – especially on a very current piece of hardware!
September 28th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Hi Kevin;
I’m having the exact same problem using my spanking new MBP 15.4″ with maxed specs including 8G RAM. I’m trying to open Keynote 08 documents with Keynote 09 and it does not display the slides in regular view and will give that error whenever I try to play the slideshow.
I was wondering whether you were able to find a fix for this yet?
September 29th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Hi again…
I just solved the problem!
To start with, I think I need to share how the problem began:
1- I bought this new MBP 15.4″ 3.06GHz, 8GHz memory, two NVidia cards (GeForce 9400M 256MB and GeForce 9600M-GT 512MB), SSD 256G, running Snow Leopard 10.6.1
2- Using the Migration Assistant app, I moved everything from my Intel iMac, which has iWork 08 installed and running Snow Leopard as well. I now actually think this is the reason I had the problem (see below).
3- When opening iWork 08 files using iWork 09, none of the iWork 09 apps worked properly. Keynote gave me the error you mentioned: “Your computer may not have enough video random-access memory (VRAM) to play the slideshow at the current screen resolution.” However, this only happens when I open the file by choosing File -> Open. If, instead, I double click the file in Finder, Keynote simply immediately crashes. In addition, I wasn’t getting editable slides in the main view, only their thumbnail previews could be seen in the navigation pane on the left. Even starting a blank presentation did that. Pages wasn’t allowing me to type, and Numbers didn’t give me any spreadsheet to work with.
4- So, because all 3 apps didn’t work, I wondered whether this was something to do with my imported user-specific preferences, versus a system-wide iWork installation problem. So I created a test account with administrative privileges, and logged out of my account and logged into the test account. Within that new account, iWork seemed to work normally!
5- So as a result of finding that out, I logged back into my regular account, and did the following:
a- Made sure I backed up my system (I have Time Machine running)
b- Dragged the Caches folder from /Users/”me”/Library/ to the Trash
c- Dragged the following files, found in/Users/”me”/Library/Preferences, to the Trash:
com.apple.iWork.Numbers.plist
com.apple.iWork.Pages.plist
com.apple.iWork.Keynote.plist
d- Shutdown
e- Safe boot (boot while holding down the shift key). This takes a couple of minutes.
f- As soon as I booted up, and it said “Safe Boot” in red font on top of the login window, I hit restart, and allowed to to boot normally. What this does is allow the system to safely generate new caches folder.
g- I then logged in normally. Then tried running Keynote, and ran perfectly, except you get that annoying “Welcome to Keynote” screen as if it was the absolute first time you opened the app. Everything worked normally from there on.
h- So I removed the test account and voila!
I think this is likely due to importing old preferences and cashes from the other machine. If that is the reason, then this must be happening to many others, and Apple should find a fix to this bug.
Hope this is helpful.