Not to answer for Buko, but he may be asking what happens if you were a brand new install? In other words when the PS application first creates the preference files.

I have similar issues with PS and Illustrator CS3, more than any time before. Frankly they load a lot of crap. I noticed that this was especially pronounced for CS3 applications.

Denise, my main machine is a G5 Quad Processor running at 2.5 Ghz and I have 16 gigs of RAM. It takes PS and Illustrator about 30 to 40 seconds to load. My point is that we have very similar machines but that I have a bit more muscle and I am getting a comparable time. Imagine if you had my machine you might get the slightly reduced start time. Its not a happy situation but our machines are getting slightly long in the tooth.

A lot of modern apps on the Mac are now using XML files for prefs and they have a habit of getting damaged and corrupted. I would manually locate them in your User directory and remove all of them by hand. Then you should do something that most do not consider.

Optimize your drives with a tool like Tech Tool or Disk Warrior. A fragmented drive severely affects PS operation in 3 ways:

1st: If you watch the PS splash screen as it loads, its loading a long list of pieces, if those are scattered across many disconnected sectors, thats slow.

2nd: If your scratch drive is pooched, that will slow down Photoshop. Don't forget what a scratch really is, its virtual memory, in other words fake RAM. BTW it never a good idea to have Photoshop and/or your OS on the same partition as your documents and scratch drive. If your hard drive is big enough, partition it or spring for another drive, they are cheap.

3rd: If your image/PS documents are on fragmented drives, again slow pokes. PS struggles to pull the sectors together.

Your info above was helpful but I could not tell what how much RAM you have, is it really 1 meg? Thats really small, more RAM will help a lot, then there is less scratch disk usage.

Finally another factor in speed, what is your dives spindle speed and access time? Faster is better.

Much luck.

Denise_Burnham

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PS CS3 taking a long time to load and seems to &quot;spin&quot; when Reading Preferences.

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