Photoshop CS3, Leopard 10.5.5, 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro 17" with 3 GB RAM. Setup has been a trouble free workhorse until today. First, I noticed some curious slowdowns under ordinary operations, such as pulling out a Guide. Kept on working, as it wasn’t too bad. Then, a new problem developed. Using the Magnifying Glass tool, I was unable to zoom all the way in. Upon progressively higher magnifications, the screen would stop responding to the tool, and the cursor would revert to the arrow. I could escape from this via keyboard commands or menu commands like View–>Fit to Screen, etc, but each time I tried to go back in, no dice, same problem. Restarted the Mac, same problem. Other operations unaffected. I could still open & save, etc. Also, the popup menu at lower left where you select whether to show Document Size, Efficiency, etc, became unresponsive.
At this point, what steps would you take to restore Photoshop to its usual flawless state?
Additional info: HD capacity is 160 GB, with 55 GBB used. No separate scratch disk right now. Was working on a 36 MB file. Should be no big deal. I did have a lot of apps open, and RAM was getting kinda full according to Menu Meters, but after closing everything & restarting, Photoshop is unchanged. Same problem. I did add a 2 GB RAM chip recently, in order to max out the RAM. This model ships with 2×1 GB chips, and maxes at 3 GB, so you add a 2 GB chip to max it.
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Not sufficient unfragmented scratch disk space? Remember the OS is using the same boot disk to build its swap files and Photoshop is setting up its scratch disk on the same volume. That can lead to fragmentation of your available drive space –which is not much to begin with.
Also, the OS and Photoshop are competing for the use of the only read/write head or set of heads on that volume.
You really need a second hard drive for Photoshop scratch disk. Since your machine is a laptop, consider a FireWire external drive.
Just to give you an idea, I keep a dedicated 160 GB second internal drive just for Photoshop scratch disk, and I have over 300 GB free on my boot drive.
Trash your PS prefs. If that doesn’t work, try running PS in a new user account. Otherwise, I’d suspect the RAM (how recent is "recent").
Ramón’s right, you should be working with a separate scratch disk, but I can’t imagine with 100GB free on a hard drive less than two years old, that swap/scratch is your problem. But I’m sure you can scare up an external drive and set it as your scratch to be sure.
OK, thank you both for your timely suggestions! I went ahead & reinstalled the Leopard 10.5.5 Combo Update, for the sake of thoroughness. I will arrange a dedicated scratch disk for my MacBook Pro a.s.a.p. I will try trashing P.S. prefs, but I really hate to trash the Settings Folder. It might come down to that, though. When I get the time, I will pull that RAM chip & see if I can see a difference. I have been seeing the odd occasional unexplained slowdown since I installed it, but OS X has those anyway, to some extent, so it’s hard to tell. Unfortunately, I must travel with the computer the day after tomorrow, so this stuff will have to wait a bit. Meanwhile, I am about to fire Photoshop back up & see if my OS overwrite has improved things.
It’s almost certainly a RAM problem. Make sure your system info says you actually have 3 gB. PS is the heaviest RAM use application in common use and if your RAM is flakey, see ya! Also make sure you don’t have Safari open.
Unfortunately, I must travel with the computer the day after tomorrow, so this stuff will have to wait a bit.
Just create a new user account. Does most of the software troubleshooting for you, and no reverting settings, etc. Just log back in to your original account when you’re done.
I don’t think that it’s RAM but I do think that it is very likely to be due to a damaged Directory particularly as you are running photoshop with out a dedicated Scratch Disk.
Run DiskWarrior by booting from a DW CD (which you can get at an AppleStore if you need it in a hurry).
I did run Disk Warrior from a 6 week old clone of my system, but not from the CD. About This Mac definitely shows 3 GB RAM. I did another Photoshop session after performing the operations described above, including trashing the preferences file. Things were better, but completely better. I am about to take the laptop on a trip with me, so concentrated troubleshooting is out for the time being. My next moves would be to pull the new RAM chip & reinstall the original 1 GB OEM chip & see if it makes any difference. The scratch disk issue I will solve with a new external firewire drive. If I still have problems, I will reinstall Photoshop. If that doesn’t do it, I’ll be headed for a complete reinstall of Leopard & all my apps.
Actually you can rebuild most of your Directory if you can boot from another drive (which has DW installed on it) instead of from your regular System HD.
You will still have a few files out of order but it will certainly help.
In no way was I referencing a "clone". The difference is there even when booting off an entirely different drive/volume that has nothing to do with the normal boot drive on which you are running DiskWarrior.
I have a couple of spare boot volumes to try/test different things, none of them created as a clone of anything, but with an OS install fresh from scratch.
