mega-attach of pictures "stalling"

OK: a not very technical and very impatient lady friend has very sketchily outlined a problem that she is encountering, whereby when she attempts to attach "a whole bunch of pictures" (a dozen or more…?) to an email it "takes forever" (takes too long and she terminates the process at an unknown point…). I did manage to get her to indicate that her perception is that the process of just attaching the emails is when the problem occurs, not the process of actually sending the emails (so, it would not be a transmission problem if that is factual…). I was however UNable to get her to take the time to explain what happens (proportionately time-wise) when she only attaches one or two or a few pictures, so I am only able to deduce that this latter scenario is not a problem (but not where the threshold is that the problem begins to surface…).

She has a year old laptop that was fairly high-end, but when she procured it I advised her to upgrade the 512 mb of memory to twice that when she got around to it (…not yet). So, her first question that started this specific inquiry, was to ask me if doubling the memory would solve this attach problem. Realizing that at this point there are lots of other hardware (and software) unknowns and variables, I would in turn like to simply pose her question to you all, and further question (because my guess is that doubling memory may well not rectify this problem) what typically are the potential culprits when doing an attach that "takes foreverâ€â€¦ I will add that I did manage to extract from her that she has attempted this same scenario with various email systems that she has at her disposal, likely Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo, her ATT ISP, and her work email system (which simply blocks mega-attaching to start with…).

If more info is needed, I can again attempt to ask her more questions...

 

I'm going to guess that the 'size' of the picture(s) is to blame. Maybe she can use a program such as Irfanview to reduce the size of the pictures before she tries to attach them to an email. Irfanview is *free* and can be found HERE .

B

 

thanks y'all, those are very good ideas, and I have to wonder why I did not think of them