Miscellaneous SPM tips and tricks

This is a pot-pourri of tips for using SPM that didn't seem to fit elsewhere. We would be very grateful for any suggestions for inclusion here.

Cancelling an SPM process

As every user of SPM knows, SPM has no Cancel button, or Back key, to go back when you've made a mistake. If you get half way through specifying some steps in an SPM series of prompts, and make a mistake, or you want to stop an SPM job running, then you can do one of two things.The first is to click in the SPM matlab window (the text window for matlab, often with a >> prompt), and press control-C, followed by return. You will get an error message, and the current process will stop, returning another >> prompt to the matlab window.

The second is to close the SPM window containing the current prompt from the GUI (the SPM input window, or the SPM file selection window). This will cancel that series of prompts.

If you get sick of making mistakes, and having to go back to the beginning, then consider [wiki:SpmBatch99 SPM batch mode], or one of our automated covariate / condition entry SPM hacks - see [wiki:SpmHowtos the SPM howtos page] for links.

SPM speed tips

Run SPM on the machine with the most memory, and the fastest CPU. More memory is usually more important than speed of CPU, within reasonable limits. In the CBU, the SPM starting commands (see the [wiki:SpmVersions SPM versions page] ) automatically run matlab and SPM on our server, which has 2GB of memory and is reasonably fast.Perhaps more importantly, put your image files on the disk that is local to the machine that will run SPM. In the CBU, this will be in our imagers directories. Also, run SPM from a directory on the same disk, so that SPM writes results onto the local disk too. The file reads and writes can slow SPM down dramatically if they have to go via the network.

Matthew Brett 9/10/99