Photoshop CS3 exstended very laggy

Former Member

for some reason, photoshop CS3 isnt working that well, i thought it was because i was running vista with 1gb of ram so i've now stuck in 4GB of ram and its still doing the same. my pro can deffinately handle it and even thouh my Graphics card is only 128 it should be able to do the same

i have
Athlon dual core 4800
4gig DDr2 4200 crucial ram
128 ati graphics card.

Former Member

Hellfire wrote: »

for some reason, photoshop CS3 isnt working that well, i thought it was because i was running vista with 1gb of ram so i've now stuck in 4GB of ram and its still doing the same. my pro can deffinately handle it and even thouh my Graphics card is only 128 it should be able to do the same

i have
Athlon dual core 4800
4gig DDr2 4200 crucial ram
128 ati graphics card.

From my experience all the Adobe CS3 products do consume quite some resources from your computer.

The HW specs you've listed looks ok, and those shouldn't be the bottleneck.
But how big is your hard drive? perhaps running out of space so windows doesn't have much left for swapfile? How fast is your drive? Perhaps defragmentation helps too.

Former Member

T-Kay wrote: »

From my experience all the Adobe CS3 products do consume quite some resources from your computer.

The HW specs you've listed looks ok, and those shouldn't be the bottleneck.
But how big is your hard drive? perhaps running out of space so windows doesn't have much left for swapfile? How fast is your drive? Perhaps defragmentation helps too.

I was going to say something similar. If the HDD where the photoshop scratchdisk is located runs out of space, photoshop (and the rest of your system) will run slooooowly. If you have 2+ HDDs it might be worth setting the scratchdisk to be placed on a different one to where windows is - you can set this in the preferences.

1GB of RAM would definitely be very slow on vista. Is the full 4GB showing up in windows? Are they matched in speed and size? PS CS3 runs fine on my laptop, with dual core 2GHz processor, 256MB GFX and 2GB DDR2 PC2-5300 RAM. It crashes often on my dad's PC, but I think that might just be broken in general.

Former Member

edit: nvm

Former Member

Use the portable version, no lag what so ever, not to mention it's only a few MB in size

edit:

1GB of RAM would definitely be very slow on vista. Is the full 4GB showing up in windows? Are they matched in speed and size?

I didn't know Adobe made any of the CS3 suite Vista 64bit compatiable, I think they're only doing that in the CS4 suite, when it's released.

Former Member

JavaKrypt wrote: »

I didn't know Adobe made any of the CS3 suite Vista 64bit compatiable, I think they're only doing that in the CS4 suite, when it's released.

Why do you think he's using x64 Vista? He could still theoretically have 3.5-4GB of RAM showing up on an x86 Vista system.

Former Member

Because he'd need to be running a 64bit version of Vista in order to use all the 4GB of RAM.
He could do with PAE, but I'm just going off little info

Former Member

TS, have you looked at CS3 and Vista FAQ on the Adobe support pages? Might be patches and stuff to download, or at least hints to improve performance

Former Member

using x86 vista, my comp is showing 3.325gig out of 4gig of ram installed. i have around 20gg hdd left, but its even slow when opening or opening a new page

Former Member

I don't use CS3 but it could be the hard drive as others have pointed out. Also, what actually is your graphics card, the memory size is just that, like with a computer a lot of vRAM without a fast GPU will still be slow.

Do you hear lots of clicking when its working, like your hard drive is looking for something? One of the things I've picked up over the years is the sound of a PC can help diagnose

If you're using Vista, press ctrl - alt - delete, task manager, performance, resource manager, and keep an eye on it whilst you do stuff. See if anything is maxing out or spiking when things slow down.