whats faster: Athlon 64 or P4 3Ghz?

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PixelPete17
Apr 8, 2004
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I may be upgrading due to a blown motherboard (or I may just replace my AMD Slot A mobo with another Slot A mobo), and am wondering now which is faster…

a 2.8 Ghz Athlon 64 or a P4 3 Ghz (c or e model) with Hyperthreading?

Figure 1 GB RAM for each system, and a 7200 RPM 120 GB HD.

I would sincerely appreciate help with this, as my head already hurts and my eyes are already strained from reading the internet for far too long. lol

Thanks sincerely,

Pete

How to Improve Photoshop Performance

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LH
Lawrence_Hudetz
Apr 8, 2004
I looked at the same question and came away deciding that my present system is still damn good for PS. The numbers simply don’t add up right unless you seldom run out of ram, which means file sizes in the 10 to 20M sizes. I run from 50M on up, and with numerous layers and filters. The last job wound up with 11Gb scratch usage! At this point, I’m not sure how much speedier a much faster computer would be.

I opened an earlier version of this image with which I was having severe problems when flattened, on a G5, and if anything it was slower, especially in rendering the screen as I changed magnification. What an eye opener that was! 3 to 5 sec on my pc, 30 sec on the G5. I wonder what video card they are using.

I am running an 850 MHz Athlon processor in an Asus A7Pro board, with 1G ram, nVidia video card. The G5 was running the big Apple flat screen, which may account for the slowdown.
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PixelPete17
Apr 8, 2004
Running a bigger monitor does nothing to photoshop processing. (I have the Cinema Display also)

Like you, the G5 does NOT impress me..not the duals, not Apple in general, not OS X, and not $3000 for an overmarketed machine to process an over-bloated operating system.

But my question remains…

of the two systems I’ve listed…anyone know which is faster and by how much? Or is a 2200+ so close in real use that I wouldn’t be able to appreciate the difference?

Thanks to all,

Pete
JB
John Bristow
Apr 8, 2004
wrote in message
I may be upgrading due to a blown motherboard (or I may just replace my
AMD Slot A mobo with another Slot A mobo), and am wondering now which is faster…
a 2.8 Ghz Athlon 64 or a P4 3 Ghz (c or e model) with Hyperthreading?

It’s a hard question to answer, everything I have read shows that the P4 performs better at the moment.

I don’t know of a 64 bit operating system that will run Photoshop and until one is released the AMD processor it will not give it’s best performance, but you will probably also need to upgrade to 64 bit software.

The way I look at it is do I accept slow performance now and upgrade the operating system and software as it becomes available, or do I wait and upgrade the whole lot at the same time?
SM
Stuart_McCoy
Apr 8, 2004
When systems are that close in speed you will likely see little difference. The pentiums are built for multimedia content development, Athlons are designed for general purpose computing. You choose.

I just upgraded my dual Pentium II Xeon 450/ 768MB RAM to a P4 2.8GHz Prescott/1GB RAM and the places I noticed a difference were really in brush tracking with my wacom and overall application startup speed. Other than that the older system really was OK for quite a bit of print and web work using Adobe apps and Painter 8.

Fastest machines only look good if you’re building a gaming rig in which case I’d suggest avoiding the P4 Prescott chips and go with the P4 Northwood or Athlon CPUs.
DP
Daryl_Pritchard
Apr 8, 2004
Stuart,

I’m surprised by what you report and wonder if you could better quantify any of your observations…perhaps not, since this was an upgrade and you don’t have the old configuration side-by-side to test against the new. To upgrade through 2 processor classes and 6x the clock speed, I’d think a pretty significant performance boost would be observed even in non-gaming use. Surely PS users would be more outspoken on minimal perceived gains if they were seeing what I interpret you to be saying. I wouldn’t really expect this to be a dual vs. single CPU issue either, although surely dual processors do help somewhat.

Prior to PS CS’s release, I was running a dual 450MHz P2 system with 512MB RAM and WinXP Pro, "getting along OK" for my hobbyist use of Photoshop but I’d have been screaming for a new system if I’d been using PS professionally on a day-to-day basis with large files. Shortly after purchasing PS CS, I upgraded my CPUs to dual 550MHz P3s and RAM to 1.5GB. Using a particular test action I’d made to manipulate a 22MB file, the upgraded configuration found this action executing 30 seconds faster for PS7 than on the dual P2. Meanwhile, when the same action executed under PSCS, performance fell off to a level comparable to the PS7/Dual P2 configuration. I think subsequent reruns improved, but PSCS/Dual P3 was never as fast as PS7/Dual P2. I never ran PSCS on the Dual P2 configuration, so I have no comparison point there.

Regardless, just these few observations for a minor clock speed bump but CPU class upgrade suggest to me that a more significant upgrade such as you performed should significantly improve PS performance. Am I correctly reading you as saying that is not what you observed? I assume you are using PS in a professional capacity as a graphic designer and would be dealing with relatively large files, so your observations do leave me curious.

Hmmmm…as I think of it, even my old collection of data from users of PS6 on Win2K machines is evidence of significant performance differences for different processors and clock speeds. I must be missing something in what you’ve said. Here’s my old data for those interested: <http://www.jazzdiver.com/photoshop/pc_test.htm>

Thanks,

Daryl
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PixelPete17
Apr 8, 2004
Oh no…don’t tell me photoshop CS is slow on PC’s also…lol

I have PS CS on OS X Panther on my G4 mac, and it’s frustratingly slower in many areas. (hence my inclination to just upgrade my PC rather than my mac and use the PC as my photoshop workstation, and use my mac as "design headquarters". 🙂

I’m not looking however to spend so much money on the upgrade, as I only allot myself certain amounts for certain purchases based upon actual value for my money, and spending about two grand on a dual Xeon system just wouldn’t be worth it to me for the difference I’d see when I know newer chips are around the corner that will hopefully yield the next jump in performance increase…maybe the next Pentium 4’s will be worth that kind of money? (just thinking out loud here)

Keep those answers coming, 🙂

Pete
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Stuart_McCoy
Apr 8, 2004
Daryl,

Well obviously there was a bump across the board and with large files in apps like Photoshop but where it was really noticable was with wacom pen tracking (much, much, much, much, much smoother now) and the speed with which most apps open (most noticably Acorbat 6 which was real pokey before, now it’s marginally pokey). I was able to get by, but I have a much higher tolerance for working with pokey machines.

As for the game performance, anandtech.com is my resource for all things hardware. If you want to know more I suggest you check this site out.
DP
Daryl_Pritchard
Apr 8, 2004
Pete,

As to your question, I’d also not expect there to be enough difference to warrant much concern when considering a P4 w/HT versus an Athlon 64 in the clock speeds you mention. If anything, I’d nearly bet either could outperform the other just depending upon what type of edits you are performing. My current "wish list" is to build a system around a 3.6GHz P4, but the Athlon 64 does have some "future-proofing" appeal…notwithstanding that the "future" comes and goes pretty quickly in this arena. I’m sure either system would more than adequately meet my needs and the only real advantage I see with the A64 is support for a 64-bit Windows O/S and subsequent applications; that is, I’d not have to replace it where I would for the P4 if I wanted to move to a 64-bit environment.

Stuart,

I’m familiar with anandtech and do agree it is a good resource. I’m not so concerned with performance of a PC for gaming as I am with PS. Notably for me, I’ve seen the healing brush to be rather sluggish and not keeping up with my pen stroke on hi-res images of 50-80MB. That was particularly true when I was running the dual P2 config, but the upgrade to dual P3s did help, even with PSCS. I’d expect a system as you’re now running to eliminate that issue for me altogether, but I’ve never used a faster system like that to actually see if my expectations are realistic. I just hope they are.

So much of what a PS user sees as noticeable improvments in performance just vary with the type of work and size of images they deal with. As you, I too have a pretty high tolerance for slow systems, but again that is because I’m doing this as a hobby. If I were billing someone for my time and wanted to espouse an image of being efficient yet productive and worth hiring, then I’d not consider my present system adequate. Still, that would also depend upon whether I was editing for the web or for print…file sizes and resolutions being much different, with web-oriented work much more forgiving of one’s resources.

In any case, it’s just interesting to see comments such as yours that invite me to question just how much improvement one can realistically expect through various options of PC upgrades/replacements.

Regards,

Daryl
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Stuart_McCoy
Apr 8, 2004
Daryl,

I should have been a bit clearer. Going from my Dual PII Xeon 450MHz system to my P4 2.8GHz Prescott HT system displayed a huge benefit speed wise. I happened to really notice this performance increase in areas such as my wacom pen tracking being much, much, much smoother than before. My old system as OK for print and web work but I’ll take the new one any day of the week now.

However, for Pete’s problems, the difference between the Athlon and the Pentium 4 are going to be likely negligible. It’s hard to say which plug-ins will notice a speed improvement and which ones will not. According to articles I’ve read some plug-ins seem to work better with the Athlon and some seem to work better with the Pentium, it’s all depends on what they are computing. You will likely be just as productive using a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 as you are a 2.8GHz Athlon. The benefit you get with the Pentium, if you choose the Prescott like I did, is the SSE3 instruction set. Not many apps take advantage of it now but when they do, multimedia funtcionality flies. The benefit of the Athlon 64 is in having a 64-bit CPU and increased memory but like the SSE3 insctruction set not many apps take advantage of it and to fill up 4GBs of RAM for my P4 will likely break most people’s bank account, much less filling the 16GB the Athlon could support. You’re really buying into the future here and I believe that the SSE3 instruction set will provide benefits long before 64-bit CPUs will. By the time 64-bit computing becomes more of a reality on the desktop it will be time to upgrade this system.
DP
Daryl_Pritchard
Apr 8, 2004
Stuart, thanks for the clarification…that all makes sense.
CC
Chris_Cox
Apr 9, 2004
PixelPete – please get real information before dismissing the G5. It sounds like you’ve been fed a bit too much FUD.
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PixelPete17
Apr 11, 2004
What is FUD Chris? Don’t know that term…

I realize you’re one of the programmers of Photoshop, so I have a certain respect for your input, but at the same time I have a full respect also for the results I see as they stand before my very face without any kind of marketing spin. That was NOT meant as a slap in your face, I just speak directly to the issue at hand, but without any kind of intent of conversational malice. The truth is, from numerous test I’ve conducted on Dual 2Ghz G5’s, that the performance is far from the promised "75% – 200%" performance increase that Adobe promised using the PS G5 plug-in, as in the real world the only difference seen was about 5%. That is to Adobe shame IMO as that was not "marketing", that was an apparent lie. Photoshop CS also consumes SOOO much more RAM than PS 7, that speed benefits of the processing power are negated to an annoying extent. MANY are switching back down to PS 7, and I myself am frustrated enough to consider using a PC for my photoshop workhorse (I was a mac fan through and through prior to somewhat-recently). The cost of a powerful PC is about one third the price of a full retail dual G5, and, even for the speed gains that the G5’s paper statistics will imply, not so much of those statistics are significantly seen in day to day use compared to the results one would see in a Dual Opteron or even a P4 3Ghz w/HT. Unless the SIX dual G5’s I’ve tested are all from the same "batch", the truth it seems is that when combined with the bloated code of OS X Panther, and the changes in PS CS code as well, that the end result in speed is not as impressive as I would expect based upon the compromised marketing of Apple and Adobe.

What information is it that you think I don’t have that would sway me back into respecting the G5 platform as being all that Apple claims it to be? (just a direct question..I know it sounds snide but it’s meant that way…truly…just the "forum effect" really 🙂 )

Pete
RL
Robert_Levine
Apr 11, 2004
Fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Bob
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LenHewitt
Apr 11, 2004
What is FUD Chris? Don’t know that term…<<

See http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/f/FUD.html
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Zeb
Apr 11, 2004
You might want to reconsider that link Len, obscene language and all that.
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ID._Awe
Apr 11, 2004
My work machine is a dual PIII 1Ghz, I recently got a P4 2.6 with HT and honestly I didn’t see what the big hoopla was about, when I changed to IDE drive for a serial drive, then there was a noticeable difference.

Chris enjoys his Macs and goes out of his way to enforce their superiority over PCs, but go to the Mac side of the forum to counter-balance his opinion. The major problem with Macs are the operators who let their machine slide down the slippery slope of non-maintenance because they just assume that the OS won’t let xxit happen.

You also have to look at OSX and the G5s, they are now very similar in hardware and software to high-end PCs but you get more bang-for-the-buck with a PC and greater hardware extensibility (just try sticking six hard drives in a G5, you can’t).

This is not anti-Mac, it’s just a real ‘reality check’.
L
LenHewitt
Apr 11, 2004
Thank you, Zeb, I hadn’t noticed the links…
WO
Walwin_Oglivie
Apr 12, 2004
I’m running Photoshop CS on my antholon 64 bit laptop I also run CS on my Desktop I dont see much difference
CC
Chris_Cox
Apr 13, 2004
Pixel – something is wrong with the system if you’re seeing a G5 run that slowly.

PS CS does NOT consume more RAM than PS 7 — but lots of people are confusing a change in numbers (much less the meaning of the numbers) and seem to think it does.

The cost of a similarly configured top of the line PC is still on par with the cost of a G5. Yes, I can always buy parts from random places and piece together a cheaper system — but well, you get what you pay for.

ID Awe – no, I just hate FUD and misinformation. I correct factual errors on both sides.
M
mwhals
Apr 15, 2004
There is no such thing as a 2.8 Ghz Athlon 64 chip. The fastest one on the market is 2.4 Ghz, which is the newly released AMD 64 FX3 chip for $800. I think you are confusing the AMD names with the chip speeds. Any of the modern AMD 64 or P4 chips should run Photoshop very well.

Mark H
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marionbabich
Apr 15, 2004
Pete,
We upgraded our two computers recently. One, an AMD 64 2800+ and the other Pentium 3.2. Both have the same 1gb ddr ram, WD 120gb hd, and g-force graphics board. Honestly I can’t tell any difference rendering files in PS CS. Coming off of a Dell 600 with 640 ram these machines are very fast. I got the AMD hoping some day PS and Microsoft will come out to support the 64 bit system.

Marion
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PixelPete17
Apr 18, 2004
Thanks Marion, (and all others also of course)

What kinds of commands are you running though…and on what size files? I typically work on 30MB – 80MB files with tons of layers, sometimes going up to about a 600MB file, but not very often.

Chris Cox: I thought the same as you, that someting must be wrong with the G5s, and in some there was….on one machine Photoshop 7 would hang or go bad and need to be reinstalled REPEATEDLY, and this was at an Apple authorized retailer on a Dual 2Ghz with 1GB RAM. I visited three times in six weeks and every time PS 7 would go corrupt, once right in front of me while I complained/explained to a very ignorant sales rep. The sales rep of course reflecs on noone but himself, but the computer problems certainly reflect on a very poor OS X implementation on G5s. Another system only had 512MB RAM, but couldn’t rotate a 70MB file 90 degrees in anything less than four minutes…tried repeatedly with a restart also and no other apps runnning…that’s pathetic performance even with scratch disk being used. On one of my own machines (I have many, but use three), a 667 DVI Powerbook w/768MB RAM, PS CS is so much slower than PS 7 under OS 9 that it’s a very poor reflection on Adobe I’m afraid. The first thing PS CS does is NOT ONLY report more RAM being used, but IMMEDIATELY (well..within the first few commands I mean) start slowing down and accessing the scratch disk on 10MB files…?….sorry Chris…I’ve read almost all of the older thread where you argued ad nauseum that it’s only a "reporting" issue, but when the computer slows down so significantly that it discourages me to even use it….well…it’s far more than "reporting" that my RAM is being "reserved"…PS CS is actually USING the RAM and consuming it like a gas guzzling american car. I’ve run repair permissions, Cocktail’s cron scripts, and anything else that has been suggested, and the bottom line is the code base of PS CS is bloated and faulty somewhere to the extent that it is CAUSING SIGNIFICANT annoyances and slowdowns for us pros that know what we’re doing. If you have suggestions on specific resolutions that might fix this problem that MANY are having, then please recommend them, but please do not say there is no such problem or that CS is "just like" PS 7, because it clearly isn’t. I say this with no venom or malice in my heart or these words, but the situation is ridiculously transparent such that the existence of a problem is clearly seen through the shared symptoms that so many are experiencing. I know there are MANY idiots in the world, and many tend to enjoy flocking into forums because noone wants to actually personally interface with some of these people, but I am not one of those "forum flockers"…I’m an intelligent working professional that is truly tired and frustrated of the marketing lies and performance failures. Your professional suggestions are more than welcome, and I look forward to possibly resoling the issues my computer is having, although the issues it has have only existed since trying PS CS under Panther 10.3.1..

Sincerely,

Pete
CC
Chris_Cox
Apr 18, 2004
Pete – no, I KNOW something would have to be wrong with the G5 to act that way (most likely bad HD or RAM).

More RAM is NOT being used – this has already been discussed to death in these forums. So far everyone is looking at the wrong numbers and drawing all sorts of incorrect conclusions.

CS is not slower, except when hampered by bad configuration, or bad third party software. Just because you have a problem does not mean that everyone else is having the same problem. There are very few "shared symptoms", and it is apparent to everyone else that there really is no problem with the software.

Specific fixes? No. You need to read the existing threads about performance problems and what people have done to resolve them. So far they all (ok, all but the OS X screen redraw glitche, and one bug they fixed in 10.3.3) boil down to configuration or bad third party software.
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PixelPete17
Apr 19, 2004
Not true Chris…I am running NO third-party software and my configuration is simply stock with no real room for being "set up incorrectly". I’d love to hear of a solution, as I am FFAAARRRRR from the only one experiencing this…just read the pro photography forums as many of us pro photoshoppers are pretty frustrated. In my own case the slowdown is so obvious I would have to shut my eyes not to see it. 768MB RAM is plenty of memory to run an OS and work on 10-20MB files…so my system is hardly "not set up correctly" in terms of hardware. I’m also on a mac as stated, so there is no "configuring" a seperate scratch disk as there is on a pc (I use both), and my 30GB HD has over 10GB free, so I’m not running into a wall in CPU power, memory availability, or free disk space…yet there are obvious slowdowns and the hard drive can be HEARD accessing data often within three commands of opening a small-ish file. Again…no third party software installed (except Cocktail really…but I assume you mean more in the lines of GUI mods, anti-virus apps, or PS plug-ins….I have none of those installed, and my mac is not connected to the net so it’s not a virus either.

I really am open to hearing what is possibly causing these blatant slow downs, but truly, none of your own proposed scenarios apply to my situation in the least, and I seemingly am possibly aware of many more disgruntled people than you’ve so far experienced on just this one Adobe forum.

I do want to point out that in my case, PS CS acts EXACTLY like PS 7 would when it starts to run out of memory…but PS CS runs out long before it’s really been tasked with a high-memory usage situation or set of commands. PS CS opens a file, reports that a very large portion of the memory is in use, AND slows down accordingly (as if the RAM is actually being used and NOT just being "reported" like you are saying), then subsequent commands jack up that figure even higher, and my scratch disk is audibly active as PS CS uses scratch disk because all the RAM has been "consumed" erroneously. I’ll run some more tests and report back when I have a little time, but right now I only have have enough time to post this….but I ultimately would want and in truth expect either an explanation or resolution as this problem is real, annoying, and seemingly abusive of PS’s installed user base.

Pete
CC
Chris_Cox
Apr 19, 2004
Pete – well, SOMETHING is wrong – because stock standard G5’s don’t behave that way.

Yes, a few people have seen odd or slow behavior on the G5 – and all of them I know of have tracked it to bad hardware or bad software.

And I wish I knew what you were seeing – because others aren’t seeing it.

And no, CS doesn’t "run nout of memory" faster than PS 7.

You’re still confusing scratch and RAM numbers (and coming to the wrong conclusions). And benchmarks show that CS isn’t slower than 7 except for a few file IO cases that are due to the OS.
RE
Rick_Eckert
Apr 20, 2004
To anyone considering building a system around a Prescott P4, believe what you may have read, they run VERY hot. So pay extra attention to ventilation. If you let it run into the yellow or red temperature zones, the CPU fan will drive you nuts in no time.
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PixelPete17
Apr 21, 2004
Chris..

Tell me how I’m misinterpreting the scratch disk actually being used when I can hear it being used LONG before the RAM is supposed to have been used up? No offense…sincerely…what am I supposedly misinterpreting when I see PS CS report large RAM usage (which you say is not "usage" but a different means of reporting than PS 7 would do), then actually slow down and start swapping to the scratch disk when in PS 7 none of these behaviors occur when running the same type, number, and sequence of commands on the same file that causes problems in PS CS?

Wanting to learn, wanting more to see this resolved,

Pete
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LenHewitt
Apr 21, 2004
Pete,

I can hear it being used LONG before the RAM is supposed to have been used
up? <<

That is NOT how Photoshop’s virtual memory management model works. The scratch file is Photoshop’s PRIME memory, the installed RAM being used as a cache for that scratch data.

No matter how much RAM you have, Photoshop creates a scratch file immediately upon opening, even before any image is opened. It does not use the scratch file as an ‘overflow’ when RAM is exhausted as you appear to believe.
CC
Chris_Cox
Apr 21, 2004
Pete – the scratch is ALWAYS active, and has been with every version of Photoshop.

No, the usage numbers are not different between PS 7 and CS — but some people have found amazing ways of misinterpreting them, or of reading the wrong numbers.
MM
Mick_Murphy
Apr 21, 2004
The scratch file is Photoshop’s PRIME memory, the installed RAM being used as a cache for that scratch data.

Brilliant Len. At last somebody has put that into comprehensible words. So following on from that, when the RAM cache runs out, then that is when the noisy disk activity begins.

By the way, I’ve done loads of timing tests of PS6 v PSCS (don’t have 7) and CS is either faster or the same in almost all cases regardless of the file size on both my machines.
DM
dave_milbut
Apr 21, 2004
Brilliant Len. At last somebody has put that into comprehensible words.

mumble grumble. chris… mumble.
MM
Mick_Murphy
Apr 21, 2004
Now now Dave. I was not saying that Chris is incomprenhensible. I recall a day not so long ago when we went through this, the Grateful Dead and a few other things but I never got it as clear as from Len up there.

Anyway, to quote from the PSCS manual:

When your system does not have enough RAM to perform an operation, Photoshop and ImageReady use a proprietary virtual memory technology, also called scratch disks.

No wonder we all get it wrong. Perhaps Len should write this section of the manual for CS2.
DM
dave_milbut
Apr 21, 2004
no. 🙂 i meant we’ve been explaining it that way since chris explained it here several moons back.
MM
Mick_Murphy
Apr 21, 2004
I must have missed Chris’s explanation. Not been around here that many moons I guess. I did get the concept a while back after Ian Lyons’ explanation but I’ve not seen it put quite so simply and succinctly before. My question as to why, if PS is always using scratch disk, does the hard disk start to get very noisy around the time that the number on the left exceeds the number of the right in the Scratch Sizes popup, never got answered. Now Len has provided the simple answer. I’m saving this quote.
L
LenHewitt
Apr 22, 2004
Dave,

Actually the VMMS in Photoshop has been that way since Photoshop 3.00 (which is when it was originally explained to me over on the old CompuServe forums – probably by Chris – when I was much younger than today!

– And that is NOT a cue for you or anyone else to start posting song lyrics!
CC
Chris_Cox
Apr 22, 2004
Len – nope, I was never on the CompuServe forums (just AOL).
DM
dave_milbut
Apr 22, 2004
And that is NOT a cue for you or anyone else to start posting song lyrics!

"Some day all this will be yours, son!"

"What?!! The curtains?"

XD
L
LenHewitt
Apr 23, 2004
Chris,

It may have been Bruce (no doubt repeating your words of wisdom<g>). Andrew Coven and Seetha also used to make sporadic visits.
CC
Chris_Cox
Apr 23, 2004
Len – at that time I was just another user…
DN
DS_Nelson
Apr 23, 2004
So there’s still hope for all us humble users today? <g>
L
LenHewitt
Apr 24, 2004
Chris,

OK, OK so I AM getting old! <g>

Must-have mockup pack for every graphic designer 🔥🔥🔥

Easy-to-use drag-n-drop Photoshop scene creator with more than 2800 items.

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