"The images themselves take up between 550 to 650 megabytes on the disk"... great freaking jehovah and all the buddhist saints, that constitutes serious cruelty to anything less than a building-sized NASA mainframe.
But... to address your question: My intuition says that your best bang-for-the-buck might come from turning some of your spinning rust into SSD. Mind you, that would be a lot of bucks. BUT, my 25 years of experience in software say you need to measure more and better before you start throwing speculative money around. If it were a Mac, I'd suggest all sorts of ways to look at what's going on and get a better handle on where the bottlenecks are. In your case, I'd track down a friend or relation who's a Windows performance expert and bribe him or her with beer or backrubs to take a look and figure out what's going on. Then you might have a clue what to do. -T On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Mark C <[email protected]> wrote: > > This weekend I finally downloaded Photoshop CS5 and installed it (I've been > making do with CS4 up till now). I also bumped up the RAM in my PC from 6 > gigs to 16. Anticipating blazing fast performance, I scanned some 6x7 negs > and started processing them. The images themselves take up between 550 to > 650 megabytes on the disk, and have a 'pixel dimension" in PS of 450 to 550 > mb. > > So... I'm not seeing any speed enhancement at all. Particularly frustrating > is when I launch a filter and things seem to just stop. For instance, I > loaded a large file and selected filter > lens correction. About 20% of the > image appears in the preview and then everything stops for 45 to 60 seconds, > then it starts up again. I fired up windows task manager and it shows ample > free memory (9 to 10 gigs 'available' and 4 to 6 gigs "free.") During the > pause the processor drops to just 1 or 2 percent utilization and the system > swap file does not grow. However - photoshop does spawn 8 to 12 temp files, > most of which show 0 KB in size but a couple of which are at the 3 to 6 > gigabyte size. During the pause, I see the drive light on, so I guess > everything is stopping while Photoshop is writing to the scratch drive. But > why is it writing to the drive when it have gobs of free memory? And yes - I > did check the performance tab and PS is set to access 12.964 gigs of ram. > Should be plenty. > > I'm starting to wonder if I should set up a ram disk and make it the PS > scratch disk. I'm not even sure if you can do that in WIndows 7 (last time I > used a RAM disk I was using a DOS computer....) > > Any thoughts? The processor is an Athlon Phenom X4 955 and the Video card is > an NVidia Geforce 250 with 1 gig of ram, running Win 7 64 bit. Not a hot rod > system but it should be competent. > > Thanks - > > Mark > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
