What about your swap drive? How much free hard drive space do you
have? What is the speed of your HD? My PS speed jumped when I put
a 7200rpm drive instead of my old 5400.
the PS user-to-user forums have great information on swap drives
and what it takes to keep the software screaming.
Lastly, what is the % CPU useage? I max mine out for long periods
of time, so I know I need a new processor. If you are not maxing it
out, there are other things that need changing to speed you up.
HTH
David
By far the best thing for Photoshop is a second drive, just for the
scratch files. The next thing is a dual processor board. The only
reason the Mac G4 flies with Photoshop is the Dual chip design. Any
Windows machine with a dual chip does the same. On a Windows
machine it is extremely important to have Windows NOT manage it's
swap file. After defragging with a utility that also defrags the
swap file, (Norton) go to the properties in "My computer" and fix
the swapfile minimum to a number at least twice the RAM you have
and the Max to unlimited. Windows (not Win2000 or Xp) will after
rebooting reserve a swapfile section on the hard drive that is
contigious. In Norton Utils, you can change the properties of the
win386.swp file to unmovable. The problem with swapfiles, Widows
and Photoshop Scratch disks, is thatthey fragment and both programs
have problems with figuring out where all the pieces are. At least
that takes time. The Photoshop scratchdisk should be on an entirely
different hard drive. That drive should be reserved only for that
purpose. It is easy to buy a cheap, small but fast Ultra ATA 20 gig
drive and partition it with a section reserved only for Photoshop.
Once in a while, delete the
.pst (photoshop temp files) as
Photoshop sometimes forgets to delete them and they take up an
enormous amount of space. With fixed swap files and a dual chip and
a defragmented drive, you can take on any Mac. As for Genuine
Fractals, the first time you save a file (or open it) it has to
load the software and that takes time but after that (in the same
session) it is much faster. Now if they only would supply a
thumbnail so I can find these images easier.
Rinus