Photoshop and Win 2000

[stevic]

Hi,

Before I get to carried away with my frustration I thought I'd ask the group for their opinion. Whenever I use Photoshop and really exercise it, layers, styles, filters etc. and I minimize the window, it takes anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds to be able to use another windows based application also when I go to shut down, windows will act normally but stops with a blue screen and I have to reboot and then shut down for the computer to shut down. Has anyone else experienced this? It's been two years now since I installed Win 2000.

System:

Windows 2000
P4 2 Ghz
512 Mhz PC800 Ram
Photoshop 7
video card ATI8500DV with 64 meg ram

What I've done:
Moved my scratch disk to a secondary hard drive
changed my memory allocation to 70%
updated my video drivers
tried to use the Win 2000 repair utility

The only thing that I can think of is to uninstall and reinstall Photoshop 7 or start from a blank page with Win XP.
Ideas please.

Craig Carlson
Sebastopol, Ca

[DannyRaphael]

Hi Craig:

Disclaimer: A W2K guru I'm not, by any stretch. Just tossin' out a couple thoughts.

Since you moved PS scratch to another drive, free space is probably not an issue.

Something you didn't mention was the status of your hard disk. Could it be overly fragmented? Is it possible the symptoms you report could be attributed to Windows overhead when switching between apps or during the shutdown process?

How much virtual memory do you have allocated (compared to the 512 MB of RAM)? If not enough (isn't rule of thumb 3x real RAM) or if your HD is fragmented, that could be a problem.

How current are you with Windows 2000 service packs? (I believe SP3 has been out for awhile and should be stable by now.)

Food for thought.

~Danny~

[stevic]

Hi Danny,

Both hard drives have been recently defragged.

>Is it possible the symptoms you report could be attributed to >Windows overhead when switching between apps or during the >shutdown process?

OK I don't understand this, please explain.

Memory is dedticated to 70% photoshop

Service packs are up to date.

All was fine 'till I tried to do a wireless connection between hither and yon.

Craig

[DannyRaphael]

Well it sounds like you've covered the bases, Craig.

RE: Windows overhead during application switching
Depending on virtual memory allocation and disk fragmentation situation and with PS allocated 70% of memory, switching over to, say, Word or whatever, would cause Windows to starting paging out PS and then begin paging in Word, which would take longer (maybe considerably longer) if HD was seriously fragged; ditto on shutdown. Not the case, though.

RE: Your only recent change was doing a wireless installation
That'll teach you! No good deed goes unpunished, bigtime.

If all was okay before the wireless adventure, seems those changes might have lept to the head of the suspect line. If it was possible to gracefully undo that wireless installation to get you back to "The way we (you) were," you'd have tried that already, so I'm fresh out of hot (cold) ideas.

If you install XP are you considering a RAM upgrade too?

[Saikat]

sol

this could be happened for many reason.

try this

install any memeory manager program like alto memory manager or memeokit.

I think this happened cause some of your system files replaced. I can be more specific if I actually know the error message it gives.

Try to install Photoshop CS v8 Its more Stable.

[stevic]

Danny, actually I thought that if this computer has to go into the shop I might go for a new mother board with a faster front side bus (presently at 400 mhz) and a cheaper kind of ram requirement right now I have rambus memory and their prices are about $100 for a 256 meg stick. I'd like to go for at least 1 Ghz of ram but because my wallet will already be out of my pocket I might go for 2 Ghz of ram. Anyone know anything about dual channel ram? I think XP is a given although I like Win 2000 for the $90 upgrade price it has more to offer.

Saikat, have you tried either one of these software packages? It sounds tempting. There are no error messages displayed with either of my problems. I'll wait for Photoshop ver 9 before I upgrade.

Craig