My motherboard : ASUS P4P800
Photoshop version : 8.0 (CS)
OS : MS Win 2000

(Sorry, I¡¦m a user from Taiwan, so my English may not be that good.)

My system originally has 2*512MB DDR400 dual channel RAM. Yesterday I upgrade it to add another 2*1GB DDR400 dual channel RAM and now my system has 3GB. And yes, I also encountered the Win 2GB RAM limit problem that was previously extensively discussed by Fred Nirque and Russell Proulx.

Besides, I found something very strange that may related to the problem :

[1].When I set PSCS to use memory approx. less than 1024MB (in fact, 1013MB, 57% on my computer), everything works fine. When I open an Nikon D70 .NEF RAW file by Camera RAW, and set the application status bar to display ¡¥Scratch Sizes¡¦ information, it displays ¡¥Scr:447.6M/986.4M.¡¦

< http://www.wretch.cc/album/show.php?i=AGThinker&b=7& f=o1118567884&p=0>

And my windows task manager displays that Photoshop occupied approx. 213MB/457MB RAM and virtual RAM.

< http://www.wretch.cc/album/show.php?i=AGThinker&b=7& f=o1118567885&p=1>

The only scratch file on my hard disk has size approx. 490MB.

However, when I set PSCS to use memory a little more than 1GB (in fact, 1031MB, 58%) and open the same file again, everything changed dramatically!! Status bar displays ¡¥Scr:1.53G/997.9M¡¦.

< http://www.wretch.cc/album/show.php?i=AGThinker&b=7& f=o1118567886&p=2>

and the windows task manager shows 197MB/1074MB!

< http://www.wretch.cc/album/show.php?i=AGThinker&b=7& f=o1118567887&p=3>

and the scratch file now becomes 1.6GB.

Moreover, before opening any file after launching PS, in the first test, task manager says the PS occupied 114MB/350MB, and in the second test, it becomes 114MB/1073MB.

How could change memory usage in 1% cause PS to behave so different? It eats more 700MB for just launching itself and even more than 1GB for open a document!

[2].Since I have 3GB memory and PS can only use only 2GB, I think its OK to set memory usage to 100% (1777MB on my system) and leave the rest 1GB for OS, PS program & PS plugins. However, my thinking is complete wrong. If I set it 100%, must things (such as Camera RAW) will not work and will produce an out of memory dialog. My OS and other applications only occupies less than 300MB memory according to what my task manager says.

I don¡¦t know whether this also happens on people who also trapped by the Photoshop Win DDR Dual-channel 2GB RAM limit. Maybe you can try it by yourself.

I really hope this can become an direct evidence that this annoying 2GB limit problem is caused by bug in Photoshop, not OS, not hardware!!

Jeff_Tsai

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