I am reducing the % of memory allocated to Photoshop. We’ll see.
The drivers haven’t been changed. Photoshop 7 ran with no problems.
I don’t have SP2 … seems too risky.
I have few programs running. In any case, that would not be a reason for a crash. (If a crash were attributable to that, then it’s an O/S fault.)
With the % memory changed from 50% to 40%, I’m did not see a crash when drawing with the pencil tool. Well, it didn’t always crash before … I’ll have to exercise it for a while to see if the new setting is really helping. We’ll soon see. Thanks.
"bmoag" wrote in message
You are probably aware that these types of crashes are usually due to diffrent programs and drivers trying to write to the same memory space or competing for Windows system resources.
Get the latest drivers for your video card. Video card drivers are prime villains in many freeze/crash problems. The blurbs on the video card
vendor
sites only talk about updates that affect games so ignore them.
Check the memory and scratch disc settings for Photoshop. You may have to dial back the amount of RAM devoted to Photoshop and change the location
of
your primary scratch disc or free up space on the primary scratch disc. Defrag the partition that holds the primary scratch disc.
If you have SP2 installed consider uninstalling it (I believe SP2 automatically archives old system files, SP1 did not so uninstalling it could kill your system). Many computers run slower during CPU or memory intensive tasks after installing SP2. I would rather use CS than SP2,
which
does not really offer anything absolutely vital at this time.
You may also want to make sure that fewer programs are running in the background at the same time eating up those limited heaps and stacks that have only marginally changed from Win 3x to WinXP. Check what loads when
the
computer boots with MSCONFIG and shut off your virus program if you are
not
downloading from the internet while using PS. Norton AV in particular conflicts with many programs and can be a source of many problems; newer NAV versions are worse resource hogs than older versions, one reason even advertiser friendly computer magazines no longer rate NAV highly.
Getting more RAM will probably not solve your problem as 512 mbs should be enough for image files up to 100mbs if there are adequate free resources.