Incorporating software demos within slide show

[maestroc]

I need a suggestion on how best to incorporate live software demos alongside a PowerPoint presentation. Part of the presentation I will be giving is a demo of various software titles so participants can see how they could be used in their classrooms.



When I did this same presentation several months ago the act of switching back and forth between PowerPoint and up to six or seven different programs running on the same computer was problematic. There were issues where the computer would simply freeze or slow down dramatically because I was asking it to do too much work at one time.

I have tried to pre-record the software demos using Camstudio but the video files it creates cannot be embedded into the PP slides, plus they look horrible or have the speed messed up when I try to convert them to WMV.

Does anyone have a solution for using live demos alongside a PowerPoint presentation? If not, what is the best, easiest, and cheapest way to pre-record the software demos as video that can be played from within a presentation?

Thank you for any help you might be able to provide.

-MaestroC