Simple as in simple.
Download the file to the WINNT directory.
open a command prompt.
cd (as in change directory) to the Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop directory. dir (as in look at the directory listing) to make sure Photoshop.exe is in that directory.
type imagecfg.exe -e
And the program will install and report that the new header is in place.
You might also care to run pagedfrg.exe …to defragment the paging file and the registry hives.
If you have a second (or third) fast hard drive, you might like to get XP going faster by rearranging some of the functionality of the PC and of Photoshop. PS needs a minimum of 500 meg for it’s scratch disc. Using a separate (ATA100) drive on a secondary controller for the (unrestricted) scratch disc will substantially speed up Photoshop after it hits the ceiling of available RAM.
The ATA bus of a modern computer is crippled by it origins in the RLL (Run Length Limited) layout when drives came out of the stone age and into the past. You would think backwards compatibility would be a good thing but it hold back development in these areas of storage and speed of access to it.
These drives and how only one on the same bus can carry out an operation at the one time, is why you can’t have a scratch drive on the same drive as a swap file and expect maximum performance. Some board makers provide two IDE bus which are really only "split" and not independent of each other so your mileage might vary here, if you have a cheap computer. Serious users have long since adopted the horrifically expensive SCSI drive arrays where all the drives can simultaneously read and write. Serial ATA has not reached the performance levels it originally promised.
Another thing you can do the smooth out Windows (NT, 2k, XP) is to set the swap file to a single fixed size. This stops the kernel from messing around creating larger and larger swap files as the day progresses. Do this from the control panel under "system\advanced". 4095 meg is the largest swap file (virtual memory) Windows can use on one disc. It uses this file to swap out data occupying RAM when a different application needs the RAM space. It prevents the computer from crashing due to lack of memory. Expect to use about 30% to 50% of this file -according to the performance monitor!
The ideal situation would be to have a fixed size swap partition on the first physical drive, dedicated to the Windows swap file. You would then have a second really fast, physical drive on the secondary IDE controller, dedicated to Photoshop’s scratch disk. Not enough room here to go into all the why’s and wherefore but you will get a substantial boost in performance of your PC from this and of course Photoshop will work better too.
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—-m0o0m
wrote in message
m0.0m,
I’m glad you were successful. Since you have actually done what I’ve only read about, would you mind posting a brief summary of how you used imagecfg.exe to accomplish this feat? There are bound to be others now who will have questions and you are more qualified to answer them than
I.
Thanks.
