Photoshop reallly sluggish / Slow

[Death Row]

Recently, I've been having some real problems with PS. As the title suggests, it's being really sluggish, like when i switch windows, and then come back to PS, toolbars will be greyed out, and then return after a few seconds. When i click menus, or tabs they very sluggishly pop up, it's not instantaneous as it should be.

a few weeks ago, i set photoshop to top priority (just to experiment) it started working pretty well, but then my computer crashed (which i half expected given the warnings when changing prioties)

My hardware is all perfectly adequate for PS to run well. and I've set PS to 70% RAM (again, i know that isn't wise, but i was experimenting) and 8 image cacheing levels, but theres still no difference.

Could somebody please give me some advice about this?
It's one thing to take a while to do a chroming filter on a high res image
but to stutter on trying to open a drop down menu!?

 

[KSoD]

What are your specs? How much RAM do you have and what OS are you running?

 

[Death Row]

Oh sorry, i though I had my specs in my sig

AMD Sempron 3000+ 1.8 ghz
1 GB RAM
32MB Nvidia graphics card

Windows XP (SP1)

 

[KSoD]

Well your specs are a tad low for Photoshop. Even with my P4 3.4GHz and 3GB of RAM it can get sluggish when i run it. When i had only 1.5GB of RAM it was super slow espically when i tried to do many images at once or browse the web at the same time.

My best suggestion would be to get another GB of RAM. That will probably be the only way to boost your speed.

 

[Death Row]

wow, I honestly thought my specs were pretty good for ps.
Thanks for the advice, i think I will get another gb of RAM sometime.

Also could you possibly advise on changing priorites in task manager?
is it ever possible to do so safely?

 

[KSoD]

Not really. The only way is under the Right Click on the My Computer Icon. The properties settings. To adjust for performance or vusuals. That is the only real safe way cause by doing so any other way takes away from the priorties of Windows files and therefor could cause crashes etc.

 

[carnageX]

Well your specs are a tad low for Photoshop

On my HP comp, I only had a gig of RAM, and I could run CS2 fine... Also had a 2.9GHz Celeron D in it... I don't see why he can't run PS8 with 1.5GB of RAM without a hitch (unless its the lower CPU speed affecting it?).

 

[KSoD]

Well your CPU is over 1GHz faster and he never said what version of Photoshop he is running. CS2 is what i was running on my system with 1.5GB of RAM and it was sluggish with CS2 open and a browser. That is all i had running.

So if he is trying to run CS3 then for sure the specs would be low. Even for CS2 they are a tad low. PS8 would be just fine. But i am guessing that it is at least CS2. Which in that case a 1.8GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM is a bit low and will be sluggish.

 

[SirCyber]

ps (all versions I've had) specifies in performance tips "build a photoshop computer dedicated to photoshop only". this would point out that it uses ALL system specs. while relatively new to photoshop, I do some of my own graphics processing for school. check your processes in task manager and kill all programs that might be using any memory or cpu usage. that's the only way that I get Lightwave 7.5 to run smoothly. best of luck

 

[Death Row]

Ok Thanks a bunch guys, I suppose I'll have to get some more RAM when i can, and possibly upgrade my processor (my brother said he was considering getting a new motherboard and CPU, so I might get his 3.4 AMD )

And yah, tis CS2