I am sitting with 2 gig of Ram, a ASUS motherboard with the fastest processor it can handle, a Matrox Parhelia graphics card, a 120 gig 7200 RPM hard drive with around 50% free space, 80% of ram allocated to to CS2, and my system seems to be crawling. I constantly defrag the HD’s, keep the registry clean and compacted, keep Norton AV from running in the background, minimal applications open at the same time CS2 is running, but it keeps taking for ever to do simple tasks, as well as other Window apps (eg. file explorer, etc.) For example, Bridge takes forever to open and when I click on a directory it is very slow in just opening up. Also, if I go to Windows file Explorer, it takes a while now to even open the directly I click on. All this started post the installation of CS2. Any suggestions?
I am sitting with 2 gig of Ram, a ASUS motherboard with the fastest processor it can handle, a Matrox Parhelia graphics card, a 120 gig 7200 RPM hard drive with around 50% free space, 80% of ram allocated to to CS2, and my system seems to be crawling. I constantly defrag the HD’s, keep the registry clean and compacted, keep Norton AV from running in the background, minimal applications open at the same time CS2 is running, but it keeps taking for ever to do simple tasks, as well as other Window apps (eg. file explorer, etc.) For example, Bridge takes forever to open and when I click on a directory it is very slow in just opening up. Also, if I go to Windows file Explorer, it takes a while now to even open the directly I click on. All this started post the installation of CS2. Any suggestions?
Reduce the amount of RAM allocated to CS2 down to 50%. You should find that all of those other applications run much faster with more RAM available. Jim
Go to "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Plug-Ins\Adobe Photoshop Only\Extensions\Bigger Tiles\" Right click on "~Bigger Tiles.8BX" and choose rename, then delete the "~"
This allows photoshop to use bigger allocations of RAM, to my understanding. On a machine with 2gigs, using smaller allocations actually slows the application down instead of speeding it up. This is not an adobe problem (again, as far as I understand) but a limit of the OS, and this is adobe’s work around.
Rgreen: Tony’s suggestion in post #1 is the most likely way to speed things up for you.
Bridge is quite a hungry beastie – and it carries on working, caching your directories and building previews, even whilst you are working in Photoshop itself.
If you’ve too much memory allocated to Photoshop, Bridge will hog all the available remaining memory and even cause the OS to page out to virtual memory. This in turn will cause everything to slow down!
The reason for having a "memory allocation" in Photoshop is not to give as much as possible to PS. Rather to ensure there is enough for it to work efficiently whilst leaving enough free for other apps. Many of the plugins and filters work outside of this allocation and often require large chunks of contiguous memory to work efficiently.
So it is a balancing act.
Other things you can do to keep things running smoothly.
* Provide PS with a large, defragmented, scratch disk (mine is 20 GB) preferably on a different physical drive to the OS to avoid competition for read/write operations.
* Clean out any redundant .TMP files
* Set Windows Virtual Memory to min=max=4GB
* Make sure none of your hard drives are more than 80% full, and defrag regularly.
* Empty the Windows Prefetch folder once a month or so.
Some reported "slow downs" have been found to be due to video/graphics card issues. If temporarily lowering your Hardware Acceleration improves things, try downloading the latest drivers.
Cheap memory can also be problematic. Always buy good quality branded sticks. (Kingston have never let me down).
Mike and Brad – I will look at my Bridge version and update to 1.02 if mine is not at the revision level. Also, I will check the tiles plug-in value as well.
Jeremy – Thanks for taking the time to list other relevant postings. I will take a look at them.
Paul – my windows version is Win2k most current service pack. Do you think I would get any better performance under XP pro? In terms of further info, when CS2 and use it, all apps start to suffer performance issues. This pervades even after closing CS2. For example, Windows Explorer will exhibit a delay in responding to a mouse click and then another when I select the directory. Now, if I reboot, all apps start behaving normally and basically POP open when double-clicked. My suspicion is that this is an issue of the way CS2 is managing memory when it is open and not releasing at the time of closure. I have observed similar behavior with other apps in the past (e.g. Corel, Internet Explorer, etc.). The problems usually get resolved by subsequent product or version releases or specific patches. Hope this helps?
Thanks for all the great responses. This is a excellent forum!
I wouldn’t worry about the Win2K, I’ve tried CS2 with Win2K sp4 on an AMD 1800 and one gig and it seemed equal to XP.
You’re thoughts on memory as being an issue could be correct, but it might be more system/hardware than Photoshop. It seems that you only have one hardrive which might be a bottleneck. I don’t know what processor you’re running, but that might also be a factor. You might try reducing your Photoshop memory allocation down to 50-55%, Image Cache down to 2, and reduce your History States to 10.
Do you have any USB drives/card readers plugged in? Maybe try unplugging them if you do.
Have you tried a clean install of your system? Delete you partition etc. and install everything from scratch.
As a final thought: I think it’s a misconception with many folks who upgrade systems over time, thinking that if you change this component or that, you will see some major performance jump. Everything in the system usually needs to be fast to have a fast system. If your using Win2K, I’ll bet your system is a few years old. (Don’t get me wrong, I really like 2K)
I feel like (and I’m sure Chris Cox will take exception) the same thing that we used to say about the F4 Phantom applies to Photoshop CS2, "If you put a big enough engine on it, you can make a brick fly." I just don’t think CS2 is as elegant as PS7 and if you want snappy performance, and everybody’s idea of snappy seems to be different, you might need a bit more muscle. The only way I’ve been able to overcome the Info pallete lag is to run CS2 on an AMD 4000 with 4 gig (latest board architecture, fast ram, multiple 10,000 RPM SATA drives etc.) That way it never gets to 100% CPU usage.
Paul – Thanks for getting back. I will have to take a closer look at some of the things you suggested. With regards to the age, I would say everything is a year or less. I can’t remember the specs right now, but my processor is the fastest one AMD makes that is compatible with my MB. I have been toying with the idea of upgrading both but to the lastest and greatest but have been hesitant just due to time it will take to reinstall and setup everything! I am sure you been down that path many times and know what I mean. Just curious, are you finding the performance boost from the SATA drives significant over IDE and are you satisfied with their reliability?
Go to "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Plug-Ins\Adobe Photoshop
Only\Extensions\Bigger Tiles\" Right click on "~Bigger Tiles.8BX" and choose rename, then delete the "~"
This allows photoshop to use bigger allocations of RAM, to my
understanding. On a machine with 2gigs, using smaller allocations actually slows the application down instead of speeding it up. This is not an adobe problem (again, as far as I understand) but a limit of the OS, and this is adobe’s work around.
Hope that helps a bit.
Brad, I tried what you said although I have only 1 Gig of ram. The funny thing is that my scratch disk (E) doesn’t show anything when I modify the file as suggested. When I leave the ~ on, the scratch disk shows "Photoshop Temp1136640, 77 748 Kb. Does this mean that by taking the tilde away, Photoshop doesn’t use a scratch disk? Marcel
I would say that the fast SATA drives offer a very significant boost in performance. I would say more important than going from 2 gigs to 4 gigs of ram.
Just curious, if your system is only a year old, why are you running Win2K? Your not one of those diehards like me are you?
I think I have 2 observations I’d like to contibute to this discussion:
a) remember that it is a computer system. Optimising for one program may be or may not be great for that program but as others have observed may induce systematic slowdowns
b) If you go for XP I’d suggest full retail over any OEM equivalents
Both observations are based on empirical onservation.
I use XP-Pro on a laptop and 2K on a desktop. My preference? 2K and my desktop! My wife uses the laptop most of the time except when I go travel and photograph. From a photograph standpoint, I prefer the CRT for detail and truer color. With the OS, personally I like 2K and feel it is more stable and easier to setup and configure when it comes to networking. It seems Microsoft worked harded with XP on hiding things!
Is your AMD4k running a 64-bit processor? Whose mother board? Asus? A8V?
Motherboard is a Asus A8N-SLI Premium, I started with the standard A8N-SLI but had trouble getting it see 4 gig reliably. I’ve also been switching between xp32 and xp64. I think for now, 64 bit doesn’t offer any advantages other than bragging rights
Seeing CS2 does not take advantage of the 64 cpu, did your current hardware configuration provide a noticable boost in performance? If you had replace everything, would you replicate the same hardware and OS (XP32/64)? Did you have a lot of problems obtaining drivers? Also, I primarily process RAW images files (average 8M in size), probably 20 to 30 at a sitting. My toplevel workflow involves a preliminary sorting in Breezebrowser, then a move into Adobe RAW, and then finally into CS2. Ninety-nine percent of the time it is to prepare images for my site, and 10 percent to print. I could switch to jpeg to eliminate steps and speed up everything, but in doing so I sacrifice the option to adjust white balance and the advantages of working with 16 bit images.
Brad, "Enable bigger tiles plug-in. If you don’t enable this plug in, photoshop will perform worse with 2gigs of ram then with a system with only 1gig. "
I cannot find an option for "bigger files plug-in" for CS2? Can you maybe lead the horse to the water on this one? Thanks much.
Paul – Whose Sata drives and what model number are you using? I have a Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe MB and am looking into upgrading my drives. The Asus documentation says it supports the Sata. Any suggestions?
I cannot find an option for "bigger files plug-in" for CS2?
From Post 7
Go to "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Plug-Ins\Adobe Photoshop Only\Extensions\Bigger Tiles\" Right click on "~Bigger Tiles.8BX" and choose rename, then delete the "~"
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