768MB of RAM is not a lot of space in which to be "jumping among other opened programs" whilst a heavyweight app like CS2 is running. Maybe this is where the trouble lays?
Have you got plenty of free, defragmented, scratch space – preferably on a different physical disk to the OS? This is important because Scratch effectively acts as PS’s ram, and it where your open images files reside.
And with so little on-board RAM, have you got Photoshop’s allocation lowered from the default 55% down to about 40% to allow sufficient free system resources for "program jumping"?
Hope this helps.
Chris.
on a different physical disk to the OS
I was an uncompromising stalwart of this postulate till now. But, having 2 separate HDDs, maybe it’s better the Windows swap (paging) file to allocate on a different physical disk (HDD1) to the OS, leaving Photoshop scratch on ‘primary’ HDD (HDD0) but on the other partition than that where system is installed (commonly Disk C)?
I suppose that swap file works much more intensively and frequently than PS scratch. And it is good for other application too.
What d’you think?
I’ve been running Photoshop CS and then CS2 with 768 MB on a totally obsolete 733 MHz machine for several years and I can hop back and forth between apps without any problem other than sluggishness due to paging. I’ve never encountered open files disappearing.
