Adobe Photoshop 7.0/CS2 9.0 Freeze Problem

A
Posted By
autumnwillow
Sep 4, 2006
Views
517
Replies
11
Status
Closed
Hi,

I am having problems with Adobe Photoshop,

first, I used Adobe Photoshop CS2 9.0 then updated it to 9.0.2. Installed Eyecandy Plug-ins.
It loads properly but about 5-10 mins of work. My computer starts to freeze.

second, I degraded from CS2 9.0.2 to Photoshop 7.0 and installed Eyecandy Plug-ins. Same problem.

Pentium 3 866mhz
512mb sdram 133mhz
GeForce 2 MX/MX400 (with the latest forceware 91.47)
1 Seagate Barracuda 40GB 7200 RPM (C:\ 20gb and D:\ 20gb no Virtual Memory) 1 Seagate Barracuda 80GB 7200 RPM (E:\ and is set as 1024 Virtual Memory) 350w PSU

This problem seems to occur everytime, and i am unable to create a single graphics out of Adobe Photoshop.

I need help badly.

Thanks

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LenHewitt
Sep 4, 2006
Well, you can’t expect CS2 to run very well on a Pentium 3 with 512 MBytes of RAM. It really doesn’t have anywhere near enough horsepower.

You should be able to run 7 reasonably well (if a bit slow) on it, however.

BUT if the whole system is freezing, that definitely points to a hardware problem – probably a bad RAM stick, but could also be your processor on the way out or a component on the motherboard failing.

Probably time for a new system as it doesn’t sound as though the one you’ve got is worth spending money on.
BL
Bob Levine
Sep 4, 2006
What motherboard? There was problem way back in the day with Asus boards.

Bob
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autumnwillow
Sep 4, 2006
Bob,

EPOX 3VSA Apollo Pro Chipset,
I installed VIA Hyperion Pro 5.09A Drivers.

LenHewitt

I used to run Adobe Photoshop CS2 in this same computer before with no problems at all. Although its a bit slow, i still could make graphics out of it. And thats what i’m after. I dont really care about speed that much for graphic designs. Unless i will be using a lot of filters.

Thanks
C
chrisjbirchall
Sep 4, 2006
With so very little on-board memory, you need to be careful not to have the amount allocated to PS set too high.

Photoshop ships with the default allocation set to 55%. In your set-up I would take this down to 40% or lower.

If you don’t, you will be starving other running apps., eg: Bridge and many of the third party plus-ins which run outside of Photoshop’s allocation. Once this happens the OS will start paging out to virtual memory, slowing things to a crawl.

Also, make sure you have at least 10 to 20GB of free, defragmented, scratch space, preferably on a different physical drive to the OS.

Photoshop uses the scratch disk as it’s main "memory" with the physical RAM acting as a kind of cache.

Hope this helps get things back on track.

Chris.
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autumnwillow
Sep 4, 2006
Chrisjbirchall,

Thats for performance, my Adobe Photoshop freezes out of just working on it after a few minutes or by applying a filter. But, thanks, I will do that when my Photoshop is fixed.
C
chrisjbirchall
Sep 4, 2006
Thats for performance

No. With low system resources, that’s for survival 🙂

It might be worth resetting the Preferences file (as detailed in the FAQs) just in case they have become corrupt after a crash or bad shut-down.

And do check you have plenty of free space (and the other things mentioned above) Lack of room to breathe will close PS down in no time. If your HD is found to be fuller than expected, do a search for any orphaned .TMP files – they can be HUGE! And remember, no HD should be allowed to become more than 80% full. Otherwise you’ll have no room for those dynamic temp files to expand, not to mention your regular defrag taking forever!

Failing all that, Len’s suggestion of bad RAM might well be the answer. PS works RAM really hard, and many a stick has been known to fail whilst still working okay with lesser applications.
MD
Michael_D_Sullivan
Sep 5, 2006
The freezing you are encountering is probably just massive and continuous paging of memory between RAM and virtual memory. Since you barely have enough RAM to satisfy the OS, background utilities such as firewall, AV, etc., and PS without anything open, there will be a need for well over 512MB of memory once you have images loaded. The OS uses virtual memory (a disk file) to accommodate the need for memory in excess of 512MB. When a program needs memory over the 512MB of RAM, the OS "pages" or "swaps" blocks of RAM to a disk file in order to free up RAM demanded by the active program. Every time a block of memory is paged, there is a delay, because a disk is much slower than RAM, and the data in RAM needs to be written to disk before the RAM is made available. If you have several programs running that are demanding memory, the disk drive can be very busy, and things slow down dramatically (and in some cases appear to freeze) while this happens. The worst case — and thus the most likely to result in a freeze — is when two programs are running at the same time and interdependent, like PS and a filter; in this case, program A demands memory, and the OS pages program B’s memory to disk, and A then makes a call to B, then program B demands memory, and the OS pages program A’s memory to disk, B then tries to send results to A, and B’s memory is paged to disk, whereupon A has to wait until B can get the data and supply it to A, which makes B take memory back from the disk and page A’s to disk, and . . . . You get the idea. Try waiting, maybe overnight, and the "freeze" will go away if this is the cause.

To avoid this increase your RAM. Going from 512MB to 768MB (or better yet, 1GB) makes a huge difference, based on my experience. At 768MB you will get few if any "freezes" due to memory swapping, but at 512MB you will get lots. You will still get performance that’s more sluggish than with 2GB or more, but it will be a vast improvement.
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autumnwillow
Sep 5, 2006
To all,

Here’s how i check whether the computer is still responding or not, mostly if i get freezes from any other applications, I do this to check whether the computer has generally crashed or not. "I press numlock / scroll lock and see if the keyboard lights up or not." If not then it must have crashed and this is what happens with my Adobe Photoshop.

According to system log, this is the last thing that executes before system failure: "The Adobe LM Service service entered the running state."

And for the sake of those people who posts about my CPU not being able to handle Adobe Photoshop’s requirements, I will try and make a 100×100 pixel image out of Adobe Photoshop with just 1 filter to see if it has something to do with my memory or not.
C
chrisjbirchall
Sep 5, 2006
I do this to check whether the computer has generally crashed or not. "I press numlock / scroll lock and see if the keyboard lights up or not." If not then it must have crashed

If only life were so simple!

And for the sake of those people who posts about my CPU not being able to handle Adobe Photoshop’s requirements…

From this comment I deduce you have decided not to take the advice offered freely here by no fewer than four experienced users.

That being the case there seems little point in continuing with this.
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autumnwillow
Sep 5, 2006
I am considering those advices.

But my point is that i’ve been using photoshop on this computer before without any problems but slow performance, until i stopped for around 1 year, then when i reinstalled there seems to be this freeze problem.

And thats what im trying to point out.

In any case, I created this 100×100 image pixel. And after applying a filter and moving the raster image, again my computer froze.
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chrisjbirchall
Sep 5, 2006
And thats what im trying to point out.

And what I’m trying to point out is that unless you explore the avenues suggested, you will never get the to root of the problem.

And so as not to waste the $169 dollars spent on upgrading the software, you really do need to spend a little more and upgrade your hardware to accommodate it.

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