I am very pleased to report that after 50 hours of testing I was finally able to solve the issue of slow Photoshop. At least on my computer, that is. And as fate would have it, it was the very last thing I tried that made a difference

Before I go into great lengths about why and how, Ill name the culprit: Kaspersky Antivirus 7.0 has a compatibility issue with CS4. At least it did on my computer. With it installed, Photoshop would run like a sloth; it would experience hangs, hiccups, delays when using any brush-based tools and crappy screen redraws and an overall poor performance. It was unusable, in fact.

First about my system: I own a pimped out HP Pavilion Elite m9180f boasting 8GB of RAM, an Intel Core2 Quad 2.66GHz processor, an nVidia 8800 GT 512MB graphics card, with 1.3 TB hard drive storage, Vista Home Premium 64bit, a built-in wireless, TV tuner and a whole slew of other cards Ill never use. Not to bad for a box of tin.

Did I mention its also pretty?

Anyway, some time ago I saved an image of my C drive featuring a minty-fresh installation of Vista, and some basic programs I always use (office, antivirus, Spyder, Wacom, Printer driver, etc). So after Photoshop CS4 turned out to be a dud, I loaded that image to get a fast install.

Installed Photoshop again but it was still slow. This was the point I started blaming my video card.

So, after spending a better chunk of one afternoon reading a single thread on the issue of slow PS CS4, having found no answers, I looked up a shop that was willing to stick a video card from a different vendor for free (well, Id have to pay for it if it worked) to see if it was a card issue, as few have suggested.

It wasnt. So a full systems check was suggested by a shop techie. It revealed that my power supply was sweating like a herd of elephants locked in a sauna to quote a famous PS guru, Deke McPhotoshop Bible.

Techie swore with his mother dentures that overworked, underpaid power supply might one day bring a gun to the office and start shooting people at random. Or slow don a computer to say the least. Skeptical at that statement, I couldnt deny that I juiced the machine beyond the specks of the power supply, so I swapped it.

But it was still a dud. Photoshop wouldnt budge.

Have you ever threw so much money and pride on a new computer that you just had to make it work, even if it meant nuclear exchange? Well, I was proliferating at this point, to say the least. So I rolled up my sleeves and started a 50 hour battle.

I migrated the documents onto a refugee hard drive and formatted the C drive. Installed the OS, then Photoshop it worked!

Basically I started installing everything back, every card, driver and child one by one, taking images every once in a while so I could restore to the previous state. I would install Photoshop and do a same test for speed every time.

Long story short, once Kaspersky AV 7.0 got loaded I was out of software to install. But that broke camels back. Tried uninstalling Kaspersky and Photoshop took off.

So I loaded my very first image and removed Kaspersky there. Sure enough it fixed the problem.

In the process I have eliminated all hardware as an issue including, Acronis True Image, Wacom tablet, Nero 8, Google Earth, Office 2007, Audacity, Daemon Tools 4 lite, Spyder Pro3, Diskkeeper 2008, Efficient WMA MP3 converter, DNG converter, HP Photosmart printer D7260, Logiteck quickcam, TeamViewer, APC uninterrupted power supply ES 750, WinRAR, Garmin Mapsource, IE, Netscape, Opera, Safari, Firefox, Skype, and that neighbor that just wont stop blasting Britney on his stereo.

I win!

James_B._Pratt

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Slow Photoshop CS4 - issue solved