CS4 Bloatware slow

[Roger Clark]

Has anyone had issues with Photoshop CS4 being sluggish? I'm working on a pretty high end Alienware core 2 duo machine with XP and 4 gigs of ram (I know XP doesn't use all of it). CS3 was nice and zippy. CS4however, is sluggish in all manners, from simply moving a window (as you drag the window its very jerky), to moving a selection with nudge on a small 1000x1000 pixel image. Are there any options for speeding it up? I had 2 GBytes of ram available for it and one would think not much would be needed for a 1000x1000 image. Painting brush strokes is so slow, the system lags my strokes by so much that feedback is poor.

I got so frustrated trying to prepare a simple graphic for a publication that I went back to CS3.

On my laptop, I have to wait seconds for things to happen, but didn't with CS3.

The install of CS3 was 2004 files and 296 MBytes, and CS4 3953 files, 542 MBytes. I guess it's nice that there is more stuff, but not at the cost of poor response.

Roger

[Doug Brown]

I find CS4 to be zippier than CS3. I'm running a Mac Pro tower with 9 GB of RAM.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Have you tried to reinstall the program? Is the amount of memory available for PS sufficient, I guess you didn't change it in the PS Preferences (Performance)?

[Alfred Forns]

No problem from my end Roger if anything I also find it better !!

[Chris Ober]

Have you done a full virus/malware scan recently? Also, try disabling your anti-virus software or desktop search/indexing if you run one. I've seen several virus programs and indexing applications flake out and bring systems to the ground.

[Dave Courtenay]

I find CS4 very slow using the clone and healing tools-seems its a common problem for people and have been told that Adobe are working on a fix

[john crookes]

what is your video card as there have been some issues with the way the cards are set up and also i would upgrade to at least 4 gb ram

John

[Paul Granone]

XP will only see 3 GB and you end up with much less due to 32 bit memory model.

I made the switch from CS3 & XP, to CS4 and Vista 64 and it is quicker.

[Paul Granone]

The big advantage to 64bit it the ability to add much more memory to your system.

One quirk. When you install CS4 64bit you will get CS4 64bit & CS4 32bit unless to de-select the 32bit install. Adobe does this for support of old 32bit Photoshop plugins. CS4 64bit will only use 64bit plugins.

I use the 64bit version of PT lens (www.epaperpress.com/ptlens) and Neat Image v6 64bit. Neat Image is very fast on my old core 2 duo 2.66 Ghz with 4 GB or RAM.

You should always give the OS & Photoshop as much memory as possible.

[Rene A]

Roger,

There is a freeware tool "XPantispy" where you can shut off all useless services that ran in the background to manual. Also go to "msconfig" under "start up" and just start up what you only need..the rest will start up only when you click on it's not "disabled" I found that those tricks speeds up CS considerably.

here is what start's at boot up:

[Jon Sostarich]

I too find CS4 not to run smoothly on my Laptop. The problem with CS4 is it moved a lot of graphics rendering to the video card and most laptops do not have a good enough video card to provide decent performance. The other problem is that video cards can not be replaced on laptops. Only gaming laptops and a few desktop replacements have high end video cards installed in them. If your laptop has an integrated Intel Video (X3100) you will have performance issues. Hopefully on the next version Adobe will rewrite their code to ease the requirements on the video card. As it stands now you need a good CPU and a good Video card to get reasonable performance. This website lists the performance of most Laptop Graphics chips. Note the Intel X3100 chip is at the bottom of the list (Class5).
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http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Graphic-Cards.130.0.html
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or
http://www.notebookcheck.net/
and search for graphic card comparisions
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