Maximizing CS Performance

LL
Posted By
Leonard_Leffand
Oct 27, 2005
Views
323
Replies
6
Status
Closed
I have a Pentuim 4 2.8Ghz Sony PC about 18 months old. It has 2.0Gb of RAM with 80% allocated to CS. I have a Radeon X800 card connected to a 23" Apple HD monitor. The two internal hard disks are Maxtor ATA 7200RPM 250Gb. The two scratch disks are the two internal drives C: and D: respectively and the Windows swap file is in the D: drive.

How can I make Photoshop run faster? Will SATA drives make a difference? What about replacing the internal drives with SCSI?

I have removed all unused programs from the system and cleaned the registry and the machine is virus and spyware free.

Performance IS acceptable, but I want to make it fly, for example sometimes adding +5 to contrast takes a 1/2 second and then sometimes it takes 5 or more seconds.

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Thanks!

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J
Jim
Oct 27, 2005
wrote in message
I have a Pentuim 4 2.8Ghz Sony PC about 18 months old. It has 2.0Gb of RAM with 80% allocated to CS. I have a Radeon X800 card connected to a 23" Apple HD monitor. The two internal hard disks are Maxtor ATA 7200RPM 250Gb. The two scratch disks are the two internal drives C: and D: respectively and the Windows swap file is in the D: drive.

How can I make Photoshop run faster? Will SATA drives make a difference? What about replacing the internal drives with SCSI?
SATA will only make a difference (to speak of anyway) if you get the 10000 rpm versions. The same can be said for SCSI.
You may also find that reducing the amount of RAM that you allow PS to allocate would make the system faster.
I have removed all unused programs from the system and cleaned the registry and the machine is virus and spyware free.
Removing unused programs makes very little difference unless so doing allows the pagefile to be bigger.
The registry never really needs cleaning.
However, one of the classic results from virus or spyware is a general system slowdown.
Performance IS acceptable, but I want to make it fly, for example sometimes adding +5 to contrast takes a 1/2 second and then sometimes it takes 5 or more seconds.
Interesting. However, my computer never takes that long to do such things. It has a 2.67 GHZ cpu with 512 mb. The disks are a 120GB ATA100 and a 250GB ATA100.
Jim
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Thanks!
WK
William Kazak
Oct 27, 2005
I have noticed that de-fragging the HD speeds things up for me. I use 2GB worth of memory.
Also, the faster the processor and the cooler it is the better for performance.
William kazak
http://www.williamkazak.com
LL
Leonard_Leffand
Oct 27, 2005
I forgot to mention the discs are defragmented. Will a dual processor machine help?

Also is there a performance gain or loss with migratingfrom CS to CS2?
JH
Jim_Hess
Oct 27, 2005
From the advice I have read in other threads, you have your memory allocation set too high. If I understand correctly, you need to leave sufficient memory for the operating system to do its job as well. The first thing I would try is setting the memory allocation back to about 40 percent and see if that makes the difference.
LL
Leonard_Leffand
Oct 27, 2005
Jim,

Thanks I will give it a try.
J
Jim
Oct 27, 2005
wrote in message
I forgot to mention the discs are defragmented. Will a dual processor machine help?

Also is there a performance gain or loss with migratingfrom CS to CS2?
If PS is designed for a dual processor, then it will run faster. I do not know if it is dual threaded or not.
No every algorithm can be dual threaded.

Sorry, I can’t answer the last question.
Jim

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