PHOTOSHOP 7 "slogging" on G4 - HELP!

R

Rob228

Registered
Running PS7 on G4 / OSX 2.8 / 1.25 Duals / 1024 RAM.

Until recently, PS was zipping along with image mods processed instantly.
I am only making simple mod's at this point (Crop, Contrast, Hue, Effects, etc. - no layers/masks). These are scanned in 35mm prints, to either TIFF or JPG format.

Out of nowhere, upon trying to load an image and/or edit it per above, the G4 and/or software grind almost to a halt, and I get this cute blue "progress bar" on my screen that doesn't progress too swiftly. It can take several minutes for one of these actions to go through - obviously not a workable situation.

Are there any "simple" solutions to this problem? (I have deleted uneeded files)

Vendor suggested increased RAM (did, to present amount); partitioning Disk (sounds risky) or De-Fragging Disc. Said would need another vendor's DeFrag product to do this - if this is so, any suggestions on goods products to buy? THANKS!!
 
Sounds odd. Couple of questions...
Do you have plenty of hard drive space (I reckon on a generous 40% free - but not less than 15%)?
Have you installed any software recently?
What does the /Applications/Utilities/Process Viewer (or whatever it was called in 10.2 - I forget - it's now Activity Monitor in 10.3) tell you about what's going on with your Mac?
Have your tried re-installing PS? Is it fully updated?

Questions, questions...
 
I wouldn't defrag the disk. But if you _want_ to fix your disk: Rather reinstall completely. Much faster than defragmenting and cleans things up just the same.
 
When was the last time you quit photoshop and reopened the program? It builds up a RAM load over time that can be cleared by simply restarting the program.

Obviously you can do a "repair permissions" through your Disk Utility as a first maintenance step, and also you can locate your photoshop preference file, make a copy of it and store it temporarily, and delete the file. When you open photoshop again it will create a new pref file and hopefully things will speed up.

Is it possible too that you hit a filter by mistake and didn't realize it?
 
Another thing you can do is partition your hard drive so that you have a volume(without apps or anything crucial) that's mostly empty to designate as your primary Scratch Disk for Photoshop. Some folks even opt to use a second or third internal drive as their designated scratch disk. You can also increase your Maximum Memory Usage in PS. All of that said, some JPEG compression algorithms simply take a while to decompress when you open them in PS. TIFFs tend to take 2-3 times as long to open as a similar-sized file that's a .psd or EPS. But that's not an official benchmark...
 
Or just buy an external firewire drive and use that as a scratch disk. I do that in my home office.
 
You can try purging the clipboards or purge all, the scratchdisk and RAM definitely will do that. If you have small HD space to begin with your problems will only increase. My advice, junk the G4 and buy a new computer, although frequently that is my only advice it does prove affective if you can afford it.
 
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