Dog, Dog slow performance

[judith moser]

I've got 2+ gz, 512 ram, 40 gig HD about 18 gig full, XP Pro, working with file sizes in the 200 to 300 meg range. Everything is slow, slow, slow, from saving in PS format to opening files. I've watched Task Manager performance showing 80 to 100% cpu usage. I've un-enabled the Norton file protection, I've re-installed PS and neither improved anything. There are times when it seems to speed up a little but haven't tied it to anything yet...maybe it is file size. Is there help for this? I'm going to install a 120 gig HD with the 40 as slave and set it up as PS suggests...will that help? I've read you can reduce your file size, work on it, then enlarge it again to speed up the process up but doesn't that degrade the file?

[Colin Walls]

Adding that extra hard drive should change performance dramatically. With your big files, PS is going to disk all the time and is fighting with Windows for access. Just make sure your new drive has a fast interface - not a USB 1.1 connection, for example.

[Ol' Whozit]

Scumware from surfing the web can gum up things too. Run AdAware and Spybot Search&Destroy, both freeware, both good to eliminate little nasties running in the background.

And defrag your hard drives. If they are that full, fragmented, that will slow you down alot too.

[Ed A. Ortiz]

>working with file sizes in the 200 to 300 meg range. Everything is slow,

slow, slow,<<




Sounds about right.

[dennis johnson]

Your performance would benefit noticeably from the addition of more RAM, although even with a Gig or two of RAM, slinging files of the size you mention won't be lightning fast.

[DOMTEK]

make sure your scratch disc is on a seperate drive than the windows paging file.

Windows says that the paging file should also be on a seperate drive from the OS drive.

Both these statements make sense to me , but I admit that I'm not sure if windows means a seperate partition or a seperate drive altogether; (for example I have my main hard drive partitioned for C to be the OS, and D as a second partition on the same drive). Idealy, this sounds as if you should have three drives, one to put the OS on, one to put the paging file on, and one for the Photoshop scratch disc.

Anyway, keep the page file seperate from the scratch disc, and it should help with speed.

[Francisco]

Manny52 <manny52@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<1dea3820.6@WebX.la2eafNXanI>...

> I too am having extremely slow performance.
> I have had Photoshop 6 installed for over a year with no problems, the only thing that has changed recently is that I added an 80Gig external backup drive to my computer. Seeing as that is probably the culprit, I have tried switching the Scratch space to all three available options (Startup, C and E) with no change in performance.
> It hangs up for 15-20 seconds between clicks even when there aren't any files open and I am just clicking around in the menus.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Manny

There is a way to speed thing up a lot (after you try to free up some
on the disk - Photoshop likes big blank areas). First, take your
image and do whatever cropping needs to be done. The machine will
still run slow. Resize that image to something very small an do a
"Save As." This will ensure that your original image is untouched.
Now, work on the resized image using layers to do any adjustments.
Put the layers in their own folder to save time. When all adjustments
are done, open up the large image. Then, just add the layers from one
image to the other. I work with images on the order of 67 mb and this
saves tons of time.