I recently bought a new PC. I used to have a virtually identical PC that was running CS2 under windows XP, until it blew up, which is why it needed to be replaced. Alas the new PC is running Vista. Under XP, the performance was great, but under Vista it is very poor indeed. In particular selecting a region or painting with a large brush, and the PC just can't cope and there are frequent pauses that make it just about impossible to use CS2. I have checked the performance monitor, and it seems that there is plenty of memory, but the CPU usage is hitting 100% all the time. But this is a 3Ghz Dual Core, with 4Gb of RAM ( only 1Gb is ever used ) and a top of the range graphics (8800) card. The issues are related to the sixe of the image, typical image sizes I edit are around 2500x2500. Provided I trim the image to about 1000x1000 then everything is ok. But this is a ral pain. Does anyone know how I can improve performance?

Have you downloaded the latest Vista video drivers from the mfr's web site?
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Charlie...
http://www.chocphoto.com

david_fazackerley@adobeforums.com wrote:
> I recently bought a new PC. I used to have a virtually identical PC that was running CS2 under windows XP, until it blew up, which is why it needed to be replaced. Alas the new PC is running Vista. Under XP, the performance was great, but under Vista it is very poor indeed. In particular selecting a region or painting with a large brush, and the PC just can't cope and there are frequent pauses that make it just about impossible to use CS2. I have checked the performance monitor, and it seems that there is plenty of memory, but the CPU usage is hitting 100% all the time. But this is a 3Ghz Dual Core, with 4Gb of RAM ( only 1Gb is ever used ) and a top of the range graphics (8800) card. The issues are related to the sixe of the image, typical image sizes I edit are around 2500x2500. Provided I trim the image to about 1000x1000 then everything is ok. But this is a ral pain. Does anyone know how I can improve performance?


CS2 is not supported under Vista, Some say that it works ok with Vista,
others have problems.You have two choices. One,upgrade to CS3. Two,get
rid of Vista.Personally I'd take option Two.

Yes. Everything is fully up to date.

What version of Vista? And while many folks have not reported problems
it's worth noting that CS2 is not supported under Vista.

Bob

david: I run CS2 under Vista 64bit and it runs exceedingly well, although I have 8GB of RAM but shouldn't make much difference. I ran tests on the size you indicated using selections and brushes and it was instantaneous for me.

Soooooooo, how many hard drives do you have? What motherboard? What version of Vista?

Hello!
No, mean it has to be something to do with Vista, not the PC. Like I say, and almost identical machine running XP is just fine.
I have one hard drive 7200rpm jobbie. Vista is the Premuim version and is fully up to date. The motherboard is an intel P35. Overall I get Vista performance figures of CPU 5.6, RAM 5.9, Graphics 5.9, Disk 5.3

OH! I have just discovered what the problem is. I don't run Vista with any of the Premium Aero graphics. I use a raditional xp setup, that is very dark; good for graphics - but the problem is there seems to be some massive performance hit when running Photoshop.

david: get a second HD to start off with, this will increase performance when you use it for your PS scratch space and your solution is actually in counter-intuitive, the Aero interface places a greater strain on system resources.

Ok, continued investigation shows that actually it happens when the image size is too large to display on the screen. Provided I keep the display size less than the screen size, then everything seems really fast indeed. The moment I zoom in to a particular section of the image, so that the total size of the image is greater than the screen, I get everything slowing down. The performance falls through the floor. What is photoshop doing differently when the image is larger than the display?

So what %percentage RAM size is your Photoshop memory allocation set to ?

Seems you should be using way more than 1GB.

with 4Gb of RAM ( only 1Gb is ever used )