Cleveland,
I asked a similar question: "Photoshop CS on Pentium 2?" 9/29/03 4:28pm </cgi-bin/webx?13/1>
Chris Cox replied that PSCS might run on a my dual 450MHz P2 system, but he’d not advise it.
At the time, I was using PS7 pretty well but with some sluggish response noted particularly when using the Healing Brush with hi-res images. I chose to go ahead and upgrade to the limits of my motherboard, moving to dual 550MHz P3 CPUs and also adding another gig of ram for 1.5GB total.
The results: Using a test action I made that includes several more CPU intensive filters (Paint Daubs, Extract) on a 27MB image, my system with PS7 and dual P2s ran the action at 2 min 45 seconds. With the P3s installed, that time was reduced to 2 minutes. With PSCS installed and the same action run only with the dual P3 configuration, I was back at 2 min 45 sec again. So, I’d be quite reluctant to run it on the older dual P2 setup.
In other words, I could say PSCS on Dual P3 = PS7 on Dual P2….although I know that isn’t technically correct and would not likely be true across the board for all editing operations.
But, if you have only a single CPU, then I suspect the difference to be even more pronounced since some processes in PS do take advantage of multiple processors.
It’s cheap to bump up to a P3 (about $60 for each of the 550MHz P3 CPUs I bought), so I’d recommend you consider it.
Regards,
Daryl