When I install Photoshop 7.0, the program gives me a message that the "scratch disk" should be installed on a separate hard drive for best performance. I have only one hard drive. After the installation, I notice that everytime I load up my machine, it takes about 3 minutes longer to get to the desktop! During this 3 minutes, I am just looking at a blank screen. Everytime I uninstall Photoshop, my computer loads up incredibly fast again without the blank screen. My machine has an AMD 2600, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive, so it isn’t slow. So my question is, would another hard drive solve this problem? Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
I’ve never heard of a Photoshop installation affecting the boot-up time of a PC. In general, it shouldn’t, to my knowledge. The only thing that is loaded for execution during startup is Adobe Gamma, and that has negligible impact upon system resources. Nonetheless, the fact you describe your system as booting faster after uninstalling PS does suggest some odd sort of problem, but not one that a second hard drive would remedy. All I can think of is some sort of peculiar conflict with some other software that may be loaded during startup and some of the common or system files that the PS installation may place on your system.
You don’t mention what O/S you’re running, so that’s some extra info to provide here. Meanwhile, the only thing that I can think of is that if you are running Norton Utilities or Norton Systemworks, look to see if any of the utility components are loaded during startup. The most notable one is Norton Protection, i.e., the protected recycle bin. With PS6 and Win2K, having Norton Protection enabled did cause a serious performance hit on PS6 once the application was launched, but I’m still unaware of any impact upon system boot-up. It’s worth checking into though. If you do have Norton Protection enabled, then disable it and see if that helps.
Thank you for responding Daryl! I forgot to mention I am running Windows XP Pro and Norton Antivirus 2004 Pro. I will check to see if the Norton Protection is enabled (I do have the "protected recycle bin" on my desktop). However, my computer has not suffered from this slowdown when Photoshop is not installed? You mentioned some sort of conflict … if this ends of being the problem, I wonder what could be causing it? Thank you again!
Disable the protected recycle bin (know issues with this all the way back to ps 6) and select a local printer as "default", even if you don’t have one installed locally. this’ll stop ps from querying the network looking for a printer that may be offline at each startup. adobe has a postscript printer driver available in the downloads area if you want to load that as default. then when you print, just select your "real" printer from the print dialog.
And about a possible conflict with Adob Gamma, check if that’s there after booting. It should be in Control Panel (switch to classic view). Should be there without having PS up.
Don’t know how in XP, but can you do a step-by-step boot? see what invokes the three minute waiting time. Rob
