I am experiencing a long wait lately Bruce. I have a G4 1 GHz DP with 1.75 RAM but it’s not cutting the mustard anymore. My husband worked out a deal with me and if I fulfill my end of the deal he will buy me a new G5.
Go "Top of the Line" : Dual processors (there could be new G5s announced for the July MacWorld). Buy a second SATA internal drive. Put 3 GB of RAM in the box.
Newer G5’s are right around the corner. Hang on a little longer. IBM’s been lagging with the chips but WWDC is very soon. Of course this is all rumors well not quite…
It really depends on what you’re doing. Drive speed depends on what you put in the box, and with big files, a lot of what happens is bound by the disk speed.
Opening a 300D raw at native resolution takes about 10 seconds on my 800MHzx2 G4, and a hair less than 3 seconds on the the 2GHzx2 G5.A complicated sharpening routine using calculations, masks, and layers that takes about 1 minute 40 seconds to execute on the G4 takes 10 seconds on the G5.
But opening a 3GB file is only slightly faster on the G5 than on the G4 (at least until I get the time to rebuild it with the internal drives striped into an array).
My G4 is close to yours (a tad faster, 1.25MHz, Dual Processors 2GB RAM, but not by much) and the speed is just phenomenal. The big difference might very well be in the four internal drives (4×160). Counting the external FW drives I have a little over a Terabyte of disk space, so I left an 80GB partition on an otherwise empty internal disk for Photoshop scratch disk. If you do the same (large dedicated scratch disk drive) with a G5 I’d expect it’ll be so fast that you won’t even notice when Photoshop completes anything.
Now, reading about the pact you’ve made with your husband, I desperately need your advice in the fine art of spousal persuasion. I want to sneak another camera by my better half. Make allowances for my being an old geezer devoid of your feminine charm, and anything you can suggest will be highly appreciated. :")
Not sure your wife will take kindly to this one. I was not going to say… but hey, it will add a little electricity to this thread. This deal was initiated by my husband.
Buckle your seat belts ladies… I can hear you now…
He wants me to lose 25 lbs and if I do he will buy me the top of the line Mac. ๐
I can lose 25 lbs literally in a week, but (1) it doesn’t even show (barely a 10% weight reduction or less) and (2) it wouldn’t be worth a camera to my wife. In hindsight, I should have sneaked it in when she was immobilized by that nail in her foot. Maybe if I offer to get rid of two or three older ones in the camera collection…
By the way, I would not even be alive today if I had ever suggested to my wife that she lose 25 lbs in exchange for anything.
By the way, I would not even be alive today if I had ever suggested to my wife that she lose 25 lbs in exchange for anything.
LOL ROTF! I must be weird but it sounded like a good deal to me…
Now if I can lose that much! I’m not "that" fat… and have more muscle since starting to work out a few years back. As you know muscle weighs more than fat. Anyway I lost 2 lbs yesterday… my whopping jump start… however that 2 lbs doesn’t count… cause he since set a number and now I still have 25 lbs to go. You all have to help me do this!!! I really need it!!! ๐
Now, reading about the pact you’ve made with your husband, I desperately need your advice in the fine art of spousal persuasion. I want to sneak another camera by my better half. Make allowances for my being an old geezer devoid of your feminine charm, and anything you can suggest will be highly appreciated.
Because I’ve bought a few in the very recent past and many throughout the years. Since I tend to hang on to everything, I haven’t even counted recently how many are resting on my shelves and in my cabinets.
You just need to get it into the house un-noticed. You put it away among all your other stuff and then, if anyone notices that you are using new gear, it’s just: "This old thing? Oh, I’ve had that for ages."
[Take it from one who has had plenty of experienceย . ]
None of that works. My wife and I have known each other for 47 years now, and I’m apparently very easy to read. She’d know in a minute. Besides, I just bought a digital SLR ("But, honey, think of all the money I’m saving by buying this one since I already have about 20 lenses that fit it." She went along that time.). It just so happens that I would also like to use my Nikon glass on a digital body too.
Example: last time we were in Beijing we happened to go our different ways one afternoon, she was buying silk, I ceramics. She met me in the hotel lobby, took one look at me and immediately asked me if I had bought a new camera, even though all my gear was up in the room, not on me. Well, not a camera, but I had in fact bought an extreme wide angle lens from a guy who had just ran out of funds, an experience you don’t want to go through in Mainland China.
If your wife likes to travel maybe you could plan a trip to Japan and tell her while you are there that you might be able to save money on that new camera you have been dreaming about ๐
Maybe Hong Kong, Jim. I don’t think I’d survive even a couple of days in Japan myself (can’t stand Japanese food), and she’s been there already anyway. But Hong Kong will have to wait several years now. Too many destinations come before that.
I can’t hardly stand that deal Linda made. If someone tried to make that kind of deal with me they better take off running. I would never get away making that kind of deal either.
Thatยs what I would have expected and that’s why I agreed with Linda when she said she was weird in that respect. As I said, my wife would have made instant worms’ meat out of me if I had ever suggested such a deal.
There was nothing improper, antagonistic or inappropriate in. On the contrary, Cindy was very sweet, but I thought it was better to return to the topic at hand.
Bruce, when you say the "fastest drives around", do you mean the 74Gb Western Digital Raptors (10K rpm)?
When you say that you stripe your disks, do you have a back-up of your RAID0 array, or at least a Mac equivalent of the "Ghost" program that is used in the dark side? Wouldn’t it be safer to just stripe the scratch disks?
My G4 is close to yours (a tad faster, 1.25MHz, Dual Processors 2GB RAM, but not by much) and the speed is just phenomenal. The big difference might very well be in the four internal drives (4×160). Counting the external FW drives I have a little over a Terabyte of disk space, so I left an 80GB partition on an otherwise empty internal disk for Photoshop scratch disk. If you do the same (large dedicated scratch disk drive) with a G5 I’d expect it’ll be so fast that you won’t even notice when Photoshop completes anything.
That would be worth a try… and hopefully will speed things up while I am waiting, but don’t think I’m backing out of this deal. ๐
BTW, I made an appeal about my weight this morning… The last time I lost weight by working out, I got down to a size 6 but weighed a lot more than I did in the past at a size 8 or even 10. He knocked 5 lbs off so now I only have to lose 20 lbs to get the Mac. Whoo hoo!
The file sizes you are using do seem to make a difference in speed. Prior to using Camera Raw I had a few jobs where the images would escallate above 800 MB but most were smaller so I didn’t complain about the speed. Now that I’m trying to create custom backgrounds with my larger photos I play the waiting game all day and it’s getting to be a read drag <no pun intended>.
You think I’m a forgiving lady? Thanks! I really never thought much about it. I guess I figure it’s all part of keeping a harmonious marriage.
Ann: I do regular maintenance of Cache Out X daily, MacJanitor EOD, and Permissions about twice a week.
Ramon and Cindy: I think it’s an oversight on my part. It just dawned on me that it probably happens when I’ve got other memory intensive apps open along with my big files. I forget that what used to be a lot of memory isn’t any more. I have 1.75 GB of memory but when I open a large file in PSCS while Illustrator, GoLive, and Acrobat Pro are running I may be pushing things.
I’ll keep an eye on how PSCS performs with other apps closed. It seems my current project has quit the SBB since closing other apps.
I haven’t looked at MacJanitor recently, but i don’t think that even running all three of those utilities does everything that Cocktail does — especially the re-Prebinding.
And do check-up on those Fnt.lst files.
Writing this reminded me to check my HD for them and I found 45 instances!
The problem one is usually one of the AdobeFnt007.lst ones which will be much larger then the rest. Trash all of them except for AdobeFnt.db.
I sympathize with you. I’m still shaking my head in disbelief. I’m all for a harmonious marriage and all that, but a brain in harmony with itself and with reality is a prerequisite. I think.
Check out this paragraph (excerpted from the link below):
b) Repairing the hard disk -This function cleans up the directory of your hard drive, making your computer run faster overall. To perform this task, find your Mac OS X Install CD #1, or your Software Restore CD #1, or the Software Restore DVD depending on your computer. Put that into your computer, and restart while holding the C key down. This will cause your computer to boot off the CD. Once it is booted, you will see the Mac OS X Installation window. Disregard that completely, and click the File menu. Select Disk Utility from the File menu. Then select your hard drive on the left, and click the First Aid tab as done in section A. Click Repair Disk. This will generally take around ten minutes to complete. It is recommended that you perform this twice. You may also Repair Permissions here as well. It is a good idea to perform these two at the same time, while booted from the CD, to make things easier.
Wow, that’s interesting Ramon. I am working on a job right now but I’ll try to do this tonight or tomorrow. I just updated the OS today but I’m working more in Illustrator than Photoshop so I can’t tell if things have improved since Illustrator runs pretty well for me anyway.
So LRK, how about your history states, do you keep them really low? I like to keep mine at 5 for normal work and crank it down to 1 when dealing with really huge files. You can even go into the History Palette Options and turn off "automatically create first snapshot" to save some RAM. On huge files these things make a difference…. Maxing out your RAM will make the biggest difference on huge files like that. Perhaps 4 gigs wouldn’t hurt. 512mb chips are a good bit cheaper than 1gig chips per dollar.
I hadn’t thought about the history states. I use them constantly but I guess on the larger files I could try reducing them.
I was hoping Layer Comps would work better but so far I’ve not been able to rely on them. I hope Adobe continues to improve and enhance the Layer Comp feature as I think it’s a great idea.
I would buy more ram but it looks like a new G5 is possibly coming my way this summer. I’m not sure if my G4 will take 4 GB of ram.
As for Safari, I’ve decided to go back to IE for a few days and see if some of the garbage goes away. Safari started with SBBs this morning again. Every time I try to quit the program I have to wait way too long. I like the interface of Safari better but may have to give it up.
Hm… I sure like the way text tooks on Safari better than IE. Easier to read. I tried chaning my settings with IE but I think the method of anti-aliasing must be different. Safari is much smoother.
Explorer > Preferences > Language/Fonts > Fonts and Size > Resolution
Make sure the resolution there matches your monitor, or at least something reasonable like 72 ppi.
For some reason, IE can default to an absurd number there that even includes two or more decimal places (say 102.86). That’s what I experienced right after switching from safari to IE, and text was awful. Not only that, but the setting in IE seemed to affect other applications if Explorer was running in the background.
It definitely happened precisely when I switched from Safari to Explorer.
So far so good. I just launched Photoshop CS and began viewing and working with some RAW files through the File Browser. I do notice an increase in speed. So far it’s snappy with very little wait.
Overall, everything seems faster… but then I’ve also run some utilities so not sure which is which as far as helping the speed.
***
Ann,
I updated my system yesterday but not sure if I’m using the latest version of Safari since it’s creation date is older. Is your version of Safari 1.2.2 (v125.7)?
I manually emptied the cache on Safari as well as running Cache Out X. It seems like there’s always something going on in the background when I run Safari. It feels like it’s doing something extra a lot of the time.
I guess it won’t hurt to download Cocktail at some point.
On the subject of History states, that would help only if you are running short of disk space for the scratch. I have it set to 30 (thirty) and experience no speed issues whatsoever. I had started out with 20, increased it to 30 and saw no difference.
Thanks Ramon. I do depend on History a lot when I compare versions. I also like using Snapshots. I have 1.75 GB of memory but with the file sizes I’m using now, that doesn’t seem as high as it once did.
Again, I hope Adobe continues to support and improve the Comping Feature. That is potentially most valuable.
Yes, Linda, I also take snapshots often. I have 2GB of RAM (maxed out), so I don’t have that much more than you have. What I do have is four internal and two external drives with oodles of available space. The Photoshop scratch disk is on a dedicated 50GB partition of an otherwise totally empty 160GB drive.
There’s hope on the horizon of the web browser universe: Firefox (formerly Mozilla Firebird). Any other browser, including Safari, is a slug by comparison. It’s still in beta (0.8 ).
I have three internal 80GB drives and two external drives, which are not used unless I need them. I might end up reformatting my older OSX drive that I used before Panther. I will say my drives are filling up and I need to back up a large number of larger files.
One external drive is kept off unless I need it. It’s the old Maxtor that I keep for older backups that I don’t have time to burn to CD. The other is my prized LaCie Pocket Drive, which I’ve had for years and use it for transferring information from one computer to another. I take it with me to one client’s office… who also uses Mac. I just plug it in with my short cord and the Mac powers it up. I also keep the OS on it which has come in handy when I helped a friend get her powerbook back up and running. It’s a little gem.
Don’t worry Cindy… it’s bouncing around a little. I ate too many grapes last night and it was up 1.5 this morning. Hopefully tomorrow morning I will be down 2. ๐
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