Have to say I don’t understand this:
Pretty expensive for a program that does not warn you that odds are good it won’t work on many systems
But, nevertheless …
If you can’t get PS 7 to work well, the last thing you want to do is install the very latest PS CS. This is very new and makes greater demands upon your system, which obviously has some problems.
Have you:
Applied the 7.0.1 update?
Tried deleteing prefs [per FAQs]?
Reinstalled PS 7?
Yes to all of your "did you" questions. I also formatted an new "C" drive, installed W2k from scratch, installed only PS7 and update, put the scratch disk on primary partition of another drive, ran a number of different RAM test utilities that showed no problems with memory. I then uninstalled all of it, re-installed on a Pentium III 650mhz machine with 512meg RAM, another NVIDIA video card, seems to run fine but very slowly with 45meg images.
The first comment was due to my researching this problem having showed that many people have had this happen. Basic response seems to be "buy a new machine". Rather a spend-y fix when it would seem this Celeron machine is still competetive with other lower end (but at least over 2ghz processors.
Have used PS7 with Win2k for year + half thousand of hours doing everything possible. PS never onced crashed. Used on P2, P3, and P4 motherboards. Most users have never had problems. Perhaps some flaky hardware in your PC. You can get utility s/w to run tests on drives, & memory. It is just as likely to be a problem with your motherboard which would be easier to replace than the entire machine. Photoshop is a powerful program that vigorously exercises more of your computer resources than most other programs – spans most of available ram space, write large files to scratch disk, revs your processor chip up to full clock speed for extended CPU time when it does math intensive filters generally causing it to consume maximumun power and stressing the power supply in your box. If there is any intermittent or flaky hardware, PS is more likely to precipitate the failure mode more than many other programs. It may appear to be a PS problem, but it likely is not.
Rgds, MM
There are also frequent artifacts (short colored lines) appearing on the image that must be removed.
the clue. you have a hardware problem. see this response from chris:
Chris Cox – 01:17pm Feb 7, 2003 Pacific (#7 of 15)
If you zoom in and they go away, it’s probably the video card.
If you zoom in and out and they change, it’s probably bad RAM.
If the image looks fine, you save it, then reload it and it’s corrupted – then it’s probably the hard disk.
Another thing to check is the motherboard, I had an ECS, went through everything I could think of and when I got a new board (an Abit) there were no problems.
I am using PS7.0.1 on win 2k for quite a while also with no problems. You should update to SP4 for Win2k. Do you have the latest video drivers installed? If the video card is AGP (probably is), make sure you have the "GART" driver for your motherboard installed, this can cause very insideous problems if it is not.
How many other things are you running in the background? – Take a look at your task bar and if it is full of icons, there could be some interaction with one of those programs.
I run PS7 on a machine not connected to the internet, so I also do not run any Anti-virus software on it. That seems to slow things down as well.
As far as going to CS, I am very biased against it. I ran it for 3 weeks, and got disgusted with the activation problems, censorship, slooooooow performance, memory hog. I put it back on the shelf and am running PS7. CS is the last Adobe product that I will ever buy, and I am not even going to use it!