photoshop CS slow?

I'm wondering if it's my machine or if it's photoshop. At times it's slow as a dog. Most of the time it's fine, but for example when i'm in the browser and I try to flag a file (control - ' ) it can take 1-2 seconds. Is it me or is it just badly written?

btw I have a P4 2.66MHz, 768MB RAM, and other good things.

Well, tim, a 2.66 MHz machine really is a darn slow machine but I'm sure you meant to say 2.666 GHz.

I have a 1.8 GHz PC with just 512 MB of RAM and when I flag a file, the response is instantaneous. Have you tried going into the task manager to see if there are any other programs running in your system; programs you are not aware of such as spyware, adware, etc.? Another thing you might want to look at is the settings of you PS preferences.

tim - on your status bar, click the little triangle and select "efficeincy". If it is below 100% it means your RAM is full and PS is using scratch disc which is much slower than RAM. You can also go to Edit (File?)> Purge> All to clear some memory. Also, if this is happening, you can use a memory stick or SD card if you have a slot for scratch disc in lieu of adding RAM. They don't recommend using removable storage for scratch disc but I tried and it works, and is faster than writing to your hard drive.

photoshop cs works fine with me, i have to say it is fast

i also have photoshop elements 2 and have noticed this is a little faster tho

Using the file browser is the bit that slows it down, so I don't.

Tumb, Can I use a CF card for scratch disc. I am running an older system. 933mh PIII, 256mg pc133, 20gig hd and windows xp pro. I dont have a lot of work flow but it does run extremely slow at times when using several layers, I know its due to my limited system. I have an hp printer that uses usb2 and has card slots in it. Is it posable to put a sandisc 256 ultra 2 card in the card slot, format it with windows and use it for scratch disk sense windows sees it as a removable hard drive. Would this speed things up . If so could you explain how to set up photoshop to use the card insted of my hard drive.

Thanks,
Adrian

Adrian - you would have to try it on your system to see if it works. Note that the manual recommends that you do not use removable memory for scratch disc, and you will get an error if you pull the stick and start PS again. I'm not at home now so don't have my manual with me, and I can't remember exactly how to set it up, but I think it's under preferences. I'll look later this evening when I get home and post back. I know on my desktop XP SP2 machine it works with a USB memory stick. I haven't tried it with my CF card reader but that's a good idea, I have a spare and will try tonight...

One more thing that might help, if you have dual drives it is faster if you set your scratch disc to the drive that PS is NOT installed in.

If the above doesn't work... When using the file browser, make sure it does all its "tasks" before trying to do anything. For example, when you click on a folder, the browser updates certain files. If you try to do something while it's "busy" it is slowwwww. Look under the thumbnail section of the browser window. When it just shows the number of images/files, you should be good to go.

Flash media has a limited number of write cycles... maybe 100,000 or more (I know it was 100,000 a few years ago) but there is a limit. Using flash as a scratch disk would probably shorten it's lifespan significantly.

Even if you did want to go this route, it would be much slower than using a hard disk. If money is tight you'd be better off picking up a used 10GB (or smaller) hard disk for scratch/temp use.

This definitely wouldn't speed things up. As soon as PS hits scratch disk it gets awful slow. And hard disks (where usually scratch is located) are A LOT faster then some CF card. So you can imagine how slow it would be when PS would hit scratch located on CF card. But otherwise yes it would work. I just don't even want to think how bad it would be And besides... with today's prices for disks, ram etc. it's much better idea to just buy another disk (they are about 100eur for 80GB or something here, and I would say we don't have lowest prices here).

My PS was running slower than crap and I ended up rebuilding the preferences. Things were great after that. I *think* it was because I had checked something to allow the file browser to run in the background - I noticed that PS was using 60-80% of the CPU and I didn't even have an image open. Rebuilding the Preferences would have unchecked that, amongst other things. So I probably could have just unchecked the file browser setting and saved a couple minutes required to re-set all my preferences. It's still an educated guess about this, but I no longer use File Browser and my system has been fine since then.

Yeah GHz... I gota stop posting while drunk

I have no adware/spyware on my machine, plenty of free RAM, it's not swapping to disk, and the preferences are pretty much set at the default. I might go and play with the prefs and see if that helps. Thanks everyone

Do what Scottes said--don't let things run in the background. And, you can set how much of your RAM is used by PS (in the preferences. I have 1Gig of RAM and have mine set for PS to use 75%.

I'll have a look at that, thanks Steven. Didn't know you needed to do that, every other program on Windows manages its own memory without user intervention.

Yeah... oddly enough this happens to me too sometimes. I don't know whats wrong, I've run ad-aware about a million times , but photoshop 7 works fine with me, so I'm thinking about just sticking with 7.