Slow and unstable Photoshop CS2 on Lenovo ThinkPad T60

JH
Posted By
Jacob_H.
Jan 30, 2007
Views
496
Replies
5
Status
Closed
We are currently experiencing problems with our photographer’s Photoshop CS2 on their Thinkpad T60’s.
We have 30 photographers all reporting that Photoshop gets very slow after working with it for a period of time. When they start Photoshop it’s perfectly fast and works normally. They open and close images, use various filters, resize etc. and then it becomes slow, even if they only have one image open. Normal Photoshop work. If they restart Photoshop it’s working perfectly normal again.
They have a Thinkpad T60 (2007-77G) with 2 gb RAM, 2.16 Ghz Core Duo CPU, plenty of free space on the 7400 rpm HDD (one partition). It’s running Windows XP SP2 with all the latest hotfixes -also the KB896256 Multiprocessor hotfix. The BIOS and all drivers are updated to the latest versions as well.

They’re running Photoshop CS2 9.02 with the Multiprocessor Support 9.02 plugin. Memory usage is set to 55% and we have tried EVERY trick in the Adobe knowledgebase.
Windows pagefile is set to 5100/5100, but we have tried several different settings for this as well without noticing any difference. The users are usually running Camerabits Photo Mechanic, Adobe Bridge or Canon Digital Photo Professional at the same time. All applications are updated to the latest versions. Trend Officescan antivirus software is installed, but we have tried uninstalling it, without any improvement at all.
We have also reinstalled everything from the ground up several times, but that makes no difference.

It’s a mystery to me why such a powerful machine can’t run Photoshop properly. Any ideas? Thanks for any help.
Jacob
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I
ID._Awe
Jan 30, 2007
The problem is that the scratch disk is on the same partition as the OS pagesys file, the problem is that after some work the HD is working really hard as the temp files are thrown all over the drive. Photoshop can generate a whopping temp file(s).

Not much you can do but shut-down and re-start Photoshop once the problem starts getting unacceptable or use a second drive.
AC
Art Campbell
Jan 30, 2007
I agree that ID’s probably on target with his suggestion about the scratch disk, but it’s also possible (though less likely) that something is leaking memory. May not be Photoshop; it could be another program that’s active, possibly even a plug in that’s often used…

Art
C
chrisjbirchall
Jan 30, 2007
….and if they don’t close PS down properly before switching off the computer (often the case with laptops) those TEMP files will remain orphaned and clog up the drive.

Do a system wide search for .TMPs and delete them.

Defrag the drive regularly to ensure you always have several GBs of contiguous space available for the scratch disk.

Never let any HD become more than 80% full (to allow for the volatile nature of temporary files)

55% memory allocated to Photoshop might still be a little on the high side if you are running several app at the same time. (Bridge is a separate app and is itself quite resource hungry)

As ID says, you should really consider an additional HD.
JH
Jacob_H.
Jan 31, 2007
Thank you for your advice.
We have HP desktops also using only one partition for everything and they don’t suffer from this problem (3,2 ghz Pentium 4 with 2 gb RAM). We also have Mac’s running Photoshop with one partition as well without problems.

I think it’s strange that Photoshop continues to be slow even after all images has been closed.

The only extra plug-in they use is the latest version of Noise Ninja.

It problem also occurs on machines with everything installed from the ground up and the disk defragmented.

This problem drives me crazy!
I
ID._Awe
Jan 31, 2007
The only thing I can think of in this case is the Lenova Security software is the culprit or that you have a virus scanner that uses an auto file scan feature.

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