Barry,
As Dave said, the Dell technicians that advised you on this are simply wrong; they need to be sent back for more training I guess.
I’m running PS CS3 without a hitch on WinXP with the 3GB switch active and 4GB RAM installed. Some have reported the switch can cause problems, so it’s prudent to have 2 entries in your boot.ini file so that you can easily reboot with the switch disabled if the need arises. Here is what my boot.ini file looks like with the command console also installed:
[boot loader]
timeout=3
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="4GB Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /FASTDETECT /3GB /NOEXECUTE=OPTOUT
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /FASTDETECT /NOEXECUTE=OPTOUT
c:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows Recovery Console" /CMDCONS
Regards,
Daryl
Dave and Daryl,
Thanks for the help. I will give this a try and see what happens. Should I expect to see anything improve in my ability to assign more RAM in PS CS3 performance preferences? Thanks for clearing this up.
Barry
Daryl,
Is it necessary to install the command console? Will the OPTOUT switch allow me to not get stuck in a boot nightmare?
Thanks for your comments
Barry
You don’t need to have command console installed in the boot.ini file. It would be wise to add the version with /3GB to the file as an additional boot option, with the original as the default, in case your system is unstable with the /3GB switch. Press the F8 key during Windows bootup to select. If you have it working OK, make the /3GB your default. After a while without incidents, you can delete the old version.
Barry,
Sorry I failed to reply sooner, but Michael answered your question sufficiently. The NOEXECUTE=OPTOUT setting is a default setting created when I installed WinXP. I chose to leave it intact so that Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is enabled, and if I ever have issues with programs that don’t launch due to DEP being active, I just add them to the exclusions list in the System control panel applet.
And true enough, the command console isn’t required although I’d never build a system without installing it, since it provides tools to help recover a system when and if it fails to fully boot properly. In my case, with a dual boot configuration, I’ve already had to use the command console once to restore a corrupt boot record and rebuilt the boot configuration after I changed out the 2nd O/S a few times and messed up the boot process. It turned out the problem was actually in this BOOT.INI file, with the partition indices in error. The BOOT.INI text I showed previously is for a single-boot system though, so the error I found doesn’t apply to it.
Regards,
Daryl
