Should My Computer Be Slow?

EMA747

EMA747

Messages
2,070
Name
Andy
Edit My Images
Yes
I am having some frustration with LR and PS being quite slow on my computer. For example with a very large TIFF file in PS and two layer something like a blur layer takes abour 1 minutes to process (ie when you hit ok to when it's finsihed doing it's stuff)! :eek:

I have just gone back to my old desktop after having to sell my laptop that was pretty perfect for LR/PS. I am just wondering if I am expecting my computer to be faster that it really is. Is the slowness expected given my spec or is there something going wrong?

My Spec:

AMD Athlon 64 3.5 GHz
1GB RAM
Geforce 6800GT 256mb Graphics card
Running XP 32 bit on a 21.5" screen.

Andy S
 
Get more RAM up it to 2GB.
 
32bit vista or xp only works with 3GB max
 
1GB is the minimum recommended RAM for PSE and if you have other things running on your PC at the same time then it will slow up.

Get Crucial to scan your PC. It will tell you what RAM you can add and what improvement you can expect. It will offer options.
Excellent company to deal with - very fast.
 
Thanks guys. :thumbs:

I think I might get another 2GB which should be about £50 and see how it goes. If it helps it's a lot cheaper than £500+ for a new computer. I can save that money for the Canon 70-200 f2.8 IS fund! :D

arclight - That Crucial tester thing is excellent. Very helpful little program.
 
Does sound a bit slow - I have a 7yr old Dell with Pentium 4 2.53Ghz processor and 1.25Gb or RAM and that drags its arse when editing decent size (40ish mb) images with multiple layers. Not tried the blur function but it's not usually as slow as you describe with curves / rotate / crop commands.

As others have said, up the RAM, it's also worth formatting and reinstalling everything if that's not been done for a while. Also investigate scratch disks in photoshop as these can have a fair effect on performance; especially if you don't have a lot of RAM.
 
For what its worth - my local computer shop guy told me that he defrags his computer every month and avoids having software on the machine which is rarely used. You can never have too much ram according to the pros who use Photoshop etc.
 
bigal474 said:
For what its worth - my local computer shop guy told me that he defrags his computer every month and avoids having software on the machine which is rarely used. You can never have too much ram according to the pros who use Photoshop etc.
Click to expand...

defrag shouldnt be needed that often these days to be honest unless youre doing a hell of a lot of read/writes.
 
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