Posted: Thu Dec 01, 2005 10:04 am Post subject: Photoshop bleeding my PC dry...
I recently bought and installed the rather spankingly good Adobe CS2 and boy what a lovely piece of kit it is however I am having a little prob.
Whenever I run either Photoshop or illustrator my computor grinds to an almost complete halt making it nigh on impossible to get on with any work. I've checked my com for nasty little bugs and all clear there and I realise that these applications to use huge amounts of resources to run well. So I hoping there was someone like me out there who's got some nifty tricks up his or her prospective sleeve and might be able to share them with me.
Cheers
P
I-Media 1702
200 Gb Hard Drive
Athalon 3200xp
512 RAM
Radeon 9200
Windows XP Home _________________ If you stand for nothing you'll fall for anything.
Ensure that your VGA card is working corectly, and that your drivers are updated (you can get the latest catalyst drivers from ATI.com), and that your direct X is updated (9.0.c, google search it, quick download and install).
From there, ensure that your machine is only running things it needs to, meaning make sure that your AOL or Yahoo! doesn't start up when your machine starts up. Same with all your programs, including Macromedia flash player (auto update), windows auto update, IE auto update, and everything else that "auto updates". Reason is that they always seem to try to update at the most inconvenient times, and that slows your computer down, specially if it auto installs after it auto updates. A shortcut to this is to go to Start>Run. Type in "msconfig" (without the quotation marks). Disable everything that doesn't need to be running, like AOL, MSN messanger, Quicktime (qtt), yahoo, etc. If you find some of these and disable them, you'll notice a dramatic increase in your machine.
Don't listen to music when working in photoshop, specially if you have onboard sound. The onboard sound on my machine is so bad that the songs actually slow down when I'm working in photoshop, needless to say that photoshop lags a little too!
Steer clear of spyware and all these "get free coupons" stuff that some how appears on everyones machines without their permission. Double check that you don't have adware programs on your machine by going to add & remove programs. If you find something that doesn't belong, remove it (like "Free coupon finder" etc.).
I'm not sure if there is any updates to photoshop CS2, but you may want to check just to be on the safe side.
More RAM would be a good thing. It's also a cheap upgrade that will help your machine run faster too.
Hope this helps. _________________ All gave some, some gave all.....Lest we forget that war produces veterans, wounded both mentally and physically, and it is our job to help them now, as they have already helped us all in ways we will never know, and in ways that we take for granted every day.
At work, I upgraded the ram from 1 gig to 2 gigs and was dumbfounded by the amount of speed that I gained from it. 1 gig is a lot, so I didn't think that I'd notice anything by going from adding another gig. Boy, was I wrong. It made a big difference.
Also, be sure that photoshops scratch disk is different from the windows scratch disk. It'll tell you at start up if it's not.
Also, (should've said this in my prior post), go to Start>Control Panel. Double click on the System icon; a window will pop up saying System properties. Click on Advanced. Now, in the box that says Performance, click on the Settings button. Click on the Advanced tab, and click the Change button at the bottom of the window (under Virtual Memory). Change your initial size so that it matches the maximum size. Do this for every drive (if you have multiple or partitioned drives). Click OK. Keep clicking OK until you are back at the Control Panel. This is actually easier than it looks (or reads), and will give windows more memory to play with on your hard drive and keep it from stealing your precious ram (windows will hog all the ram it can if it needs to, specially if it's run out of room on the paging file). _________________ All gave some, some gave all.....Lest we forget that war produces veterans, wounded both mentally and physically, and it is our job to help them now, as they have already helped us all in ways we will never know, and in ways that we take for granted every day.
You'll probably see me around the forums from now on. Recently started back at uni (supposedly being 24yrs old make me a mature student) studying graphics so people's opinions about my work would be a big help.
Cheers again for the info, looks like i'm gonna have to fork out for more RAM which is never a bad thing.
P (nice smilies by the way) _________________ If you stand for nothing you'll fall for anything.
Joined: 23 Nov 2004
Posts: 1478
Location: Swansea UK
Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 6:23 am Post subject:
Get Ad-Aware se as well, it finds things spybot misses, and spybot catches some stuff ad aware misses, so run both. also turn off Norton if you use it (disconnect from the net first though) as it uses a lot of resources. Wayne
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(nice smilies by the way)
