The home system I use for freelancing is a 3ghz speed PC, running XP, with decent graphics card, and a gig of memory installed. Also, the Photoshop scratch disc on a different drive.

It's fast, handling multiple 1 gig files without much slowdown, but I'm wondering if upgrading to 2 gigs of memory will things speed up even more?

XP doesn't handle memory very well (normally writing to the hard drive instead) and I only even see all of my memory get all used up when opening many large files.

On the plus side, my home PC runs just as fast as my G5 Mac in the city, that's loaded with about 6 gigs of memory. Take that, Mac snobs! Apart from the Mac possibly handling memory a little better, I'd rather pay a grand for my system at home, than the six grand my boss laid out! ;)

Open the Windows Task Manager - ctrl+alt+delete should do it. Under the performance tab you'll see stats for processor and memory usage. Work in photoshop as you normally would and take a glance at your memory usage every now and then. If you find yourself maxing out your available physical memory while working in Photoshop then maybe more RAM will help. Under the Processes tab in the TaskMan you can sort the running processes by 'memory usage' to see which processes are using how much memory - that can help you with your decision too because if you're running other applications all the time they play a part in the available memory too.

I have 1.5GB of RAM on this XP machine and Photoshop is set to use 55% of available RAM with my scratch disk being on an IDE RAID stripe volume that always has more than 100GB of space available. Usually when I start photoshop I already have enough other things running in XP that only 60% or so of my physical RAM is available. I don't notice 7, CS2 or CS3beta getting slower very often (been using the same machine for nearly 4 years) but if Photoshop is hogging up RAM because I've just gone through 50 or more images or have been working for hours on something with dozens of layers then other applications on my machine will become sluggish or non-responsive. More RAM might help there but what also helps is to just close Photoshop and restart it if I need to continue working.

When it comes down to memory, it's pretty esay too me.. I''ve bulid computers for some time now, and my general opinion is this: You will never have enough memory :bigthmb:

U can tweak the memory so that ex. Photoshop uses alot of memory, and yeah, your workflow should be faster..

Photoshop uses random-access memory (RAM) to process image information. The more RAM available to Photoshop, the faster Photoshop can process image information. Other open applications and startup programs decrease the amount of memory potentially available to Photoshop. Quitting applications or startup items you are not using makes more memory available to Photoshop.

To allocate more memory to Photoshop:

1. Choose Photoshop > Preferences > Memory & Image Cache.

2. In the Memory Usage section, increase the Maximum Used by Photoshop percentage, and click OK.

3. Restart Photoshop.



Don't forget the graficscard tho..minimum 256 mb, and tweak the preformence on your gfx-card if needed..

I've got WinXP, 4 gig mem, and dual Gforce ultra 6800 256 mb (Nvidia), and i have no problems what so ever. I work in 3D Studio max aswell, and np problem there either..(huge renders could take some time tho)

You could take a look on this tweak (http://www.majorgeeks.com/Adobe_Photoshop_SpeedUp_d4318.html) It should work with Photoshop 4 and up too CS..

Hope this might help u abit reguarding the memory-issue :bigthmb: