ot - computer related question

[back alley]

i've tried twice this weekend to get a file ready, in photoshop, of a photo i want to have printed for the print swap.

i have worked on the scan and did my little post production process dance only to have my computer freeze during the process and then i have to shut down photoshop thereby losing all my hard work.

this second time it froze when i hit the save button.
very frustrating!!

is it my computer, a need for more ram or some such thing?
and why now when it did not do this before.

joe

 

[Doug]

Adding more RAM is likely to help, as Photoshop is a memory hog. And Photoshop also uses some hard drive space for a "swap file" used for data for its Undo feature among other things I think. So a sizable amount of nice blank hard drive space makes it happy too. If you don't have 50+ Mb of drive space free and clear, that might contribute to PS hiccups. This comes to mind with your comment about crashing at the Save stage. "Why now?" Are you working with larger files than before?

 

[back alley]

i am working with larger files so that fits.
i have plenty of hard drive space.

guess it's time to add some more ram.
thanks doug.

joe

 

[Biber]

Try increasing the maximum amount of ram ps is allowed to use (preferences -> memory & image cache).

 

[Luf]

Hi. Also it may help if you close some of the process running in background, that are memory consuming also. Minimize all windows you don't need, or close it at all. Buying more Ram is also a very good idea.
Good luck.

 

[Stephan]

Check yout scratch drives in PS's preferences. You need a lot of ram for big images but a big empty scratch drive is just as important, the best you can do is to have a seperate partition on a hard drive you arent using whilst using photoshop (on a second hard disk, not a second partition of your primary drive), idealy with nothing but empty space in it. Fast drives are always better too of course. When I use heavy files with photshop I use a blank partition of my external hard drive as a scratch drive, since I only have a laptop and the HD in that in pretty slow 😉

Also if the problem is with your cache file filling up you might be able to just wait it out, event the application isnt responding if you wait half an hour or so it might sort itself out, but your best bet it to set up a large scratch drive and throw some ram at it, and photoshop will love you forever like a little puppy. Also, it likes to be walked outside at least once a day 😀

 

[Sonnar Brian]

How much memory is on your computer, what is the CPU, and what version of Windows are you using?

Photoshop 3.0 has yet to lock up on my Pentium Pro running Windows 95 on 192MByte of RAM, for example.

 

[MacDaddy]

What OS are you running? What amount of RAM and what size HD? What type of system (i.e.; laptop?desktop? ) How old is your system? What version of Photoshop are you running? Have you either defragged your hard drive lately or run disk permissions of it's a Mac?
I agree with all the others that you might try shutting down all unnecessary apps and/or processes while doing this work. It might also help to stop at various stages in your post processing and save your work to that point. If you're running any version newer than 6, you can always use the history tabs to go back to a previous "state" if you change your mind later.
The current general rule for Photoshop scratch disk space is 10 to 1 (i.e.; if you're working with a file that's 300MB in size, allow 3 GIGABYTES of HD space for serious "breathing room")

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Dave, These problems can always be traced to Human Error.

Yes, HAL. It was the IDIOT that wrote Windows.

 

[dmr]

I might offer 2 suggestions.

1. Save the work occasionally. That way if the system flies south you will most likely have some of your effort saved.

2. Close and re-open every so often, if not working with jpeg files. This not only frees up that history/undo space, but it also gets a lot of things in a known clean state.

I've found that Photoshop is usually very good about telling you that it can't do something for some reason like a drive getting full, but not always.

Another trick I've recently learned is when making a print you want to show off, restart your system and don't open other applications until the print is done. There's less pausing and disk thrashing during printing. I've had prints pause or fail mid-page when the system has not been restarted for several days. Doing a clean start seems to guarantee a good print.

 

[thpook]

I might offer 2 suggestions.

2. Close and re-open every so often, if not working with jpeg files. This not only frees up that history/undo space, but it also gets a lot of things in a known clean state.

Or use the Purge Cache command. It's in one of the dropdown menus. Unfortunately I'm not at my lovely photoshop machine, so I can't tell you its precise location, but it clears history/undo without shutting down and restarting PS.

 

[dmr]

Or use the Purge Cache command. It's in one of the dropdown menus. Unfortunately I'm not at my lovely photoshop machine, so I can't tell you its precise location, but it clears history/undo without shutting down and restarting PS.

If you do a dir of the disk, at least with Photoshop 5 (yeah, I know, I should upgrade) the purge commands don't free up nearly as much disk space as either closing and reopening or a total restart.

 

[back alley]

so many questions!

i am using a dell computer with a pentium 4 processor. i have 2 gigs of memory, with lots of it empty. running windows xp home edition. ram, i think, is 256 and it will only take another 256. it's a desktop.

thanks for all the help guys.

joe

 

[tpersin]

just say no to more RAM and fire up the enlarger 😉

 

[egpj]

Let me get this straight, you are running a pentium 4 with 2 gigs of disk space and 256 mb of ram? You must really be using an old version of Photoshop. I wonder if just increasing the RAM will work out for you. If a new computer is not in your future then you can try the extra RAM but it might not work out. Try saving the file after each change. Also, do not work on the original file but a copy of the file. Good luck.

Glenn

 

[back alley]

glenn,

it sounds like you think something is wrong with my set up.
it's about 5 years old and unfortunately there is not a new one in my immediate future.

i have photoshop version 7.

joe

 

[kmack]

If it is a matter of "It was working and now it is not", I would first do a diagnostic on the memory I have before buying new memory.

Memtest86 is a free utilitly that you can use to test your existing RAM. They have ISO images available so you can burn a bootable cdrom.

Once you have determined that your existing memory is still good then go out and buy more memory. 256 meg is just not enough.

 

[kmack]

If this is the same system you use to access the net, this being a windows system, you may also want to check the obvious: Worms, Viruses, spyware and adware.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Joe, two Gigabytes of memory on a Pentium 4 should be plenty. I second the check for viruses.

It could also be bad memory. Modern machines do not have HW parity checks. An intermittent error that gets past the boot-up will lock up a machine. If it keeps doing this after the virus test, pull the memory cards one-by-one and test for lockup.

 

[Socke]

If this is the same system you use to access the net, this being a windows system, you may also want to check the obvious: Worms, Viruses, spyware and adware.

And don't forget the most obvious, the harddisk!

I'm just working on a 40GB Seagate from a 5 year old HP Pavillon PC. It has some bad sectors which might be responsible for system crashes for wich the user held Windows ME responsible. Until yesterday when the boot sector was hit.
Up to now I found two bad sectors in the Windows swap file and one in msdos.sys, so no wonder WinME wouldn'T start anymore.

Harddrives are mechanical devices and when you use them a lot, say more than eight hours a day, you should prepare for a replacement every three years.