Building a Graphics Workstation: Installing and Tweaking Photoshop CS3
June 20, 2008
Installing Photoshop CS3
If you are considering installing the trial version of Photoshop CS3 then be aware that many people had to uninstall it before they could activate their full version of the application.
When you are installing Photoshop CS3 as a part of Design Suite, many additional components will get installed as well... Among them is a Bonjour Service. If you experience network problems afterwards and you suspect that they might be due to this service, the following steps could help you to uninstall this service:
Go to 'Start' --> right click on 'My Computer' --> choose 'Manage' --> Services and Applications --> Services
Find the service. It might be the first one listed, with hexadecimal name. Stop and disable the service.
Then go to 'Start' --> 'Run' --> and type
sc delete "bonjour service"
Hit enter, restart your computer and check if the service was removed.
Allocating more RAM to Photoshop
If you have more then 2 GB of RAM installed in your Windows XP 32 bit system and you want to allocate more then the maximum default 2 GB of RAM to Photoshop, you will need to set up 3 GB switch first.
After you set up 3GB switch and rebooted, open Photoshop and go to 'Edit' --> 'Preferences' --> 'Performance'. The similar window should appear:
Now you can adjust the sliding bar and set up how much memory you want allocate to Photoshop. The optimal amount depends on the size of your graphic files versus the amount of multitasking you are planning to do. If you increase the amount of RAM for Photoshop to 100% of available RAM, other applications that you are trying to use at the same time (Bridge, Lightroom) might not have enough RAM left. That might result in swapping to hard drive and performance loss. The best way is to experiment and watch the memory usage in the Task Manager during initial testing.
I allocated 100% of available RAM to Photoshop, resulting in about 2.7 GB of available RAM. I generally close other applications when working with large files in Photoshop.
Setting a Scratch Disk for Photoshop
If you do not have enough RAM for your graphic files when working in Photoshop two things might happen: Photoshop will start using 'Scratch Disk' and operating system might start swapping to hard drive as well. There are several recommendations regarding Photoshop scratch disk:
- Adobe recommends setting the scratch disk to a different hard disk than the one Windows uses for its paging file.
- It is recommended that Windows XP paging file should be set on different hard disk than the one with Windows XP operating system.
- Adobe also claims that RAID 0 partitions provide the best possible performance as Photoshop scratch disks.
To set up the scratch disk in Photoshop, open Photoshop, and go to 'Edit' --> 'Preferences' --> 'Performance'. The similar window should appear:
I set up Photoshop scratch disk on the first partition on my RAID 0 volume (the first 50 GB, with the highest transfer rate).
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