slow computer, need help

[gregf1]

I believe 2GBs of memory is too small for Photoshop and the scans you're doing. If you have a 400MB file it's all loading in memory. Remember Windows it self uses 512MB - 1GB for operating system. I recommend you upgrade to atleast 4GBs more if the system will support it. If the system runs out of memory it swaps files to disk, disk is much slower then memory so it significant impacts performance. Also close any an all programs as they take up memory.

 

I run 4GBs in both my apples and have no problems with speed.

[b_hall1]

Of course the task manager can show what is running and the percentage of processor usage it's taking. And there was

one virus was actually named Windows.exe and of course it appeared normal to have Windows running. (But idle

processes is normal.)

 

But also use the Windows file search and search for all files created or modified on the present day. (Windows searches

for all files and folders but there is a configuration where you tell it to really search for all files and folders...including

searches of system folders for instance.) Look for zip files (often in the Java Jar) that you didn't install on the creation date

and look for .exe files that you didn't install on the creation date. If you can't delete the bad file then it may have a Registry

key written in one of two common locations. Use Window's Run and go to Regedit. Then it's something like Local

Machine-Software-Windows-Current Version-Run and Current User-Software-Windows-Current Version-Run. If a

Registry key matches a bad file then delete the key and then go back to Windows search and delete the file. (Of course

there may be a program that rewrites the key and re-installs the bad file (!) and that calls for re-installing the operating

system.)

 

Or...boot up in safemode (use Windows Run to get the msconfig utility, under the General tab check Selective Startup,

and under the Boot tab select Safeboot) to delete the bad files and let Windows take away the bad Registry keys. (Of

course there may be a program that re-installs the bad files and that calls for re-installing the operating system.)

 

Oh is that computer connected to the internet ?

[kelly_flanigan1]

Here the old IBM dream machine I mentioned above is used on the internet since 1996; since it still works well it must not have enought crud like a bad rootkit to bog it. With all my couple of dozen machines that use photoshop; I have NEVER had to reinstall photoshop to fix a slowness issue at all; and I started with PS version 2.5 on the PC. Most all issues I have seen with others hosed up computers are rootkits; too much crap installed so there are conflicts; gobs of *.tmp files that wer not deleted after a crash; etc. Each newer version of PC takes up more memory; all the eyecandy is pork and takes up more ram. With a good rootkit it might be so well hidden that canned detector/spy software cannot find it; some Jr high kid is storing games on your machine while you are trying to play with large files.

[claudinho]

Are you runnings Vista or XP? There is a lot of difference

[DavidRabinowitz]

Claudio, i'm running Vista...

 

thanks everyone, i'm sorting through your comments and have begun to try some recommendations...

 

 

David

[chrissyone]

Not sure if it's mentioned above, but be sure to keep your working files off the boot drive. Must better to have them on

another volume. Also, having an empty volume or two for scratch disks helps a lot. Never set your boot disk as a scratch

disk if you don't have to.

[dino_kusturica]

Actually go to www.malwarebytes.org and download a free copy of malwarebytes and run it.

Then follow on screen instruction how to use it and clean it up with malwarebytes.

Reboot your pc.

 

If that don't help, click on start==>run==> type CMD (not case sensitive) and hit ok or enter==>on the command prompt (that black screen) type: sfc /scannow and hit enter then wait until is done.

Reboot.

You can also allocate additional memmory for your pc when you go to:

Right click onto My Computer ==> properties (left click) ==> Advanced ==>click onto Advanced tab again on Performance Option screen ==>Virtual Memmory and click change ==> then choose custom size and put something like 1.5 x your current memmory, (i.e. if you have a 2GB allocate 3GB, etc..).

Click ok, ok, ok, then go out of this and reboot.

 

Hope this will help you.

[dino_kusturica]

Also you can also defrag your hard drives, which is really easy to do: open your C drive (double click onto my computer i. e. ) right click onto your C drive, Tools, defrag now.

That also will help you out.

[claudinho]

Ok this is my list of to dos.<br>

<li>Run Antivirus and AntiSpyware once a month at least. (Avira Antivir killed a Trojan that others could not and is

free)

This switch back my laptop to high speed<br></li>

<li>Defrag computer a least once a month with windows defrag. Use also Auslogics disk defrag (free software)<br>

<li>Use CCleaner to clean registry and other stuff.<br>

<li>Remove unwanted programs from the start with msconfig.<br>

<li>If You can use the software Tuneup utilitues 2007 or 2008. Veery good for maintenance.<br>

 

<li>Vista is a high memory consumer: if possible switch back to XP (a friend of mine has your same problem with 3D

software, changed OS and results were great)<br>

 

<li>A second hard disk faster enough than current. <br>

Make partitions 2 on both disks. (assuming is a desktop pc) connect both disks as masters.

1Disk 1 partition, OS (20 to 25 GB for XP, for Vista I don't know)

1Disk 2 partition, all your pictures, videos, My docs, etc Your working disk...This could be also your scracth disk

(the rest GB of the disk)

2Disk 1 partition, swap or page file (about 4GB is enough ? 1,5-to 3 times your RAM for XP)

2 disk 2 partition, for backup or same destination than 1,2 without scratch disk, (Rest GB of the disk)

[manuel barrera houston,]

depends on your computer as to how much memory update you can do, many older computers are limited to 2G,

suggest you move all but essential programs to external hard drive to free up some space on your computer, or

change the hard drive (larger) in your lap top, they are not that expensive, nor difficult to install

[twmeyer]

After an admittedly quick scan of the contributions, I can only suggest that you reset preferences by hitting

Ctrl, Alt and Shift simultaneously and <i>immediately</i> after launching Photoshop. It will ask "Do you want to

Delete the Photoshop Setting File"... say YES and then go to Preferences and Color Settings to re-establish your

protocols. You should pick up a lot of speed.<p> Then get yourself a couple of good externals with at least a 16

or 32Mb cache and set them as your Primary and Secondary Scratch Disks, set your C Drive as the third Scratch

Disk. And get a good registry cleaning software (I use WinCleaner and CA Anti-Virus). Lose Norton, it's a memory

hog.<p>I believe Vista needs 1Gig of memory just to run the OS.

With 2gigs total, you will always be slower than working on a desktop with two fast and large internal drives and

4 gigs of RAM. <p>Time to re-invest, man. Especially if you want to routinely work on 200Mb files... t

[DavidRabinowitz]

thanks again...i was surprised to get such a great response...i've got a busy schedule today but will give several of these

ideas a try and will post my results...i ran scandisk yesterday with nothing found, i will defragment the drive several times

next and continue down the list of your helpful suggestion...regards....David

[stane]

What antivirus program are you running? My old comp also have speed problems, but after removing Panda and now under Kaspersky, my comp is like a new born.

[kelly_flanigan1]

One could always just "reinvest" in a less bloaded OS like old windows2000 too!<BR><BR>Here is the performance with a box built back in 2002/2003 with a 2.5Ghz Cpu;400Mhz bus; 2 gigs of ram. It started life as an XP box with woes; we rebuilt it with win2000 an it still perforrms well today.<BR><BR> File size versus time to rotate 90 degrees<BR><BR>12.5 megs 0.23 seconds<BR><BR>25.1megs 0.5 seconds<BR><BR>50.1 megs 1.0 seconds<BR><BR>100.3 megs 1.9 seconds<BR><BR>178.3 megs 3.5 seconds<BR><BR>256.7 megs 11.9 seconds<BR><BR>500megs 101.9 seconds<BR><BR>713 megs 127.6 seconds<BR><BR>1024 megs file 257.0 seconds<BR><BR>This box is used each year in creating calendars that are typically 100 to 200 megs with layers too..

[DavidRabinowitz]

Stane, i'm running Avast...i had Kaspersky with my XP but could not install it on the Vista...i called Kaspersky and they told me i was out of luck...Kelly, i'm envious of your numbers...thanks! David

[christianaires]

Another one that could be causing you this grief is the fact that you dont have much room left on your drive.

 

Once hd are close to full

they lose a lot of their speed.

 

Since the data is written on the outside edge of the disks, it takes much longer for the needle to read it all.

 

What i like to do for laptop work is this.

 

Have my main drive for work. and have a external drive for completed work/backups.

 

This way you keep your main drive free to do what it needs to do.

 

And another really important thing is this.

 

Check the airflow slots underneath your laptop..

Do you see much dust? if you do. you might be in need of a dust clean..

 

The dust fills up those airflow slots which starves the cpu of fresh air. making it run hot and slower.

 

Give these a try before you spend a load of money on upgrades.

 

Good luck.

[jack376]

Have you tried the previous suggestion for using spybot search and destroy?

 

most likely, something(s) is running in the background, usually spyware. please download spybot here

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/

its freeware, one of the best around. once you install, make sure you run an update first then run the scan. chances are, you will see it find a lot of problems.

 

hard disk space has NOTHING to do with how fast/slow your computer runs. 2GB of ram is good enough for image manipulation. you would need more if you do renderings. though adding more doesn't hurt, its not likely a problem because you have 2GB.

 

if spybot doesn't work, i recommend reinstalling windows (after you back up everything to an external). when you reinstall, it will reformat your harddrive. this gets rid of all of the bad stuff...its also much cheaper than anything else.

 

good luck

[dawn_kelly]

Jack Chin said "hard disk space has NOTHING to do with how fast/slow your computer runs".

 

Yes and no. You are right that whether you have 50GB free or 10GB free it shouldn't make a difference, but it does since the drive starts to write to the outer edge of the disk, like Christian Aires said, which is not as fast as writing to the inner edge. Then you add to it the fact that the drive, which is having to wait longer now to make the read/writes, is having to possibly deal with this slowing working speed while dealing with the file fragments. If the drive has not been defragmented, then the head is flying around every where and having to wait longer times to do its thing. I single pass of the Windows defrag utility is a good start, but it doesn't do a very through job. Multiple passes will get the best performance increase. IObit makes a very good defrag program, but the latest versions I have downloaded get tagged by my antivirus software as having either a virus or other malware/annoyance-ware in it. The earlier IObit program does a very good and fast job.

 

Putting the exact same data on a disk that is 2 or 3 or 5x the size will show a very noticable speed improvement on the computer due to the data residing on the inner edge of the drive.

[DavidRabinowitz]

Jack, yes, i downloaded and ran a version of spybot...nothing was found...i downloaded and purchased a product to

detect malware which was recommended here..it found over 500 errors which were eliminated...neither helped

performance though...

 

Dawn, my computer is set up to defrag every 6 days...i defraged once today and tried a second time but i had to shut it

down after 4 hours without completion...i have extra hard drives and it was recommended that i allocate the scratch disk

to these drives (not sure exactly what that means but i will try to figure out how to do this)...

 

thanks for your advice...

[kelly_flanigan1]

Its actually faster to write to the outer radius on a disc drive that the inner; the linear velocity is almost double. There media transfer rate is higher at the outer radius; then it drops off and is lowest at the inner ID. Sometimes its one half to say 60 to 70 percent of the OD. Everything is better at the OD; one has almost twice the linear velocity; thus aboutr twice the output voltage from the the R/W (read write) gap. Here I spent many years in the disc drive industry, several working in the heads and media engineering area.

[lynn_hall]

You might read though these in case something pops out. Otherwise try them in order.

 

Clean out the Prefetch folder. Go to "C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch" and delete all of the files. Don't worry they will rebuild. The files are used to speed up the startup of programs and can become corrupted. So cleaning them out is one troubleshooting practice.

 

In Photoshop there was a setting for scratch disks which were basically where Photoshop kept its temp files. Although ccleaner is good at removing temp files from other software it doesn't list Photoshop. I haven't looked at CS2 or 3 enough to say that it still exists. Some software seems to automatically load garbage from temp files it keeps. Check to see if Photoshop has left any junk in where it puts its scratch/temp files and clean it out. (If you are unsure just move it to a different location.)

 

If you haven't yet done so open a command prompt type in "chkdsk /r" w/o quotes and press enter. Reboot and let chkdsk run.

 

If it doesn't find any problems which it might not if defrag ran then you might try running the PageDefrag utility from here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx. It will tell you how many fragments your Page file has if it as multiple fragments then have the PageDefrag utility run the next time the computer reboots.

 

One thing I have seen in other software is where extensions/plug-ins or software settings can significantly add to the system overhead. So if you have added a new plug-in or recently modified a setting in PhotoShop you might see if you can turn it off the plug-in or undo the setting change.

 

If this just all of a sudden started to happen then look at the utilities autoruns and process explorer from here. Process explorer does a better job of telling you what is running and autoruns does an excellent job of telling you what is starting up. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cb56073f-62a3-4ed8-9dd6-40c84cb9e2f5.aspx

[jdchoate]

Regular Maintenance for Windows systems:

 

Close all programs and empty the trash (oh yeah, I mean Recycle Bin) first. Then do the following.

 

Delete all content from temp directories. I do not know the new directory paths in Vista, I think they start under c:\user or something like that. Viewing of hidden files needs to be enabled first... go to Folder Options under the Tools menu... Click the View tab... under Hidden files and folders, click Show hidden files and folders. This will apply to Vista as well, but there might be some differences.

In XP, you would need to go to C:\Documents and Settings\your-user-name\Local Settings\Temp and C:\Documents and Settings\your-user-name\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files ... delete all content in those directories, as well as C:\Documents and Settings\your-user-name\Cookies.

Then, go to C:\Windows\Temp and delete everything in there. There will probably be a few files which say they are in use, just de-select them and delete the rest

 

It will also help to delete leftovers from Windows Updates... in C:\Windows there might be several directories, probably colored blue, with names starting and ending with $. These are leftovers from Windows Updates and are there in case a user decides to uninstall the updates in case the updates caused a problem. If uninstalling updates is not needed, neither are the directories and files starting and ending with $. This will free up a nice chunk of hard drive space.

 

After doing all of that, then run defrag... it will be much more effective then.

 

As others have recommended earlier, SpybotS&D can be a Windows computer's best friend. Also good to use is Lavasoft's program Adaware. http://www.lavasoft.com/ also free. Spybot will complain when it is started if adaware is installed, just press ignore.. it will still work fine with both programs installed.

I highly recommend using more than 1 antivirus program, just don't have them all set to autoscan... run them manually once per week, after updating.

I seriously suggest getting AVG if you do not have it already... free for home use. http://free.avg.com

Also highly suggested is Avast! http://www.avast.com/eng/programs.html the second link in the downloads is the free home edition... registration is free and done through email and then good for a year, free renewall after that.

Between those two antivirus apps, you should have no need for Mc***ee or N***on antivirus products. Usually they never report much of anything except when to renew your subscription and how much money to pay them. I seriously think their employees actually moonlight as virus authors for job security. ;)

Under no circumstances run any antivirus with a generic sounding name like... "Antivirus 2009" or "XP Antivirus" ... then again, if you were, you would have several viruses reported to exist (even if they don't) and be prompted to buy the program so it could fix them.

 

Good Luck.. the combination of all of the above should get things running right again.

 

 

PS. One more thing. In Control Panel, go to 'System', or right-click on 'My Computer' and choose Properties. Then the Performance tab, then Advanced. Where it says Virtual Memory, choose change. There will be a value for minimum and maximum size of virtual memory. These should both be set to the same value, at 2x the amount of installed memory. So, if your computer had 1 Gig of RAM, set the values both to 2048. If you have 2 Gigs of RAM, set them both to 4096, etc.

[jacopo_brembati]

David, <br>

i don't understand. Is your computer slow at any time or is the computer slow while using adobe products?<br>

If the problem is while you work with adobe products, the problem is on adobe products.<br>

If the pc is slow at any time, the problem is : some process saturates the resources. <br><br>

After starting the pc, is the allocated memory too large? Is the cpu level too high? <br>

In that case, verify wich process is running.

[kelly_flanigan1]

With a nice rootkit its often masked such that the processes do not show up; thus these simple tools do not often show whats "keeping the brakes on", In one example a friend had an entire hidden website running on his computer thats web connected; hidden away in the recycle/trash area; totally hidden from view. Stuff like this makes many PC users move to Macs; because on can be more careless and pick up very little dog/cow manure while walking thru a field/internet. Each piece of software one adds say on a PC adds the possiblity of conflicts; each causes the boot times to lengthen a tad. David's computer is also a laptop; which typically has the first design goal of battery life; not balls to the wall performance; plus its got Vista; which is abit bloaded with crap folks crave; eyecandy.

[DavidRabinowitz]

Jacopo, my computer is much slower when using Photoshop...i am not sure how much energy should be allocated to

photoshop and bridge but combined it is often over 1GB...

 

Kelly, i've been considering a Mac...that's down the line though...

 

Lynn and John...thanks for your advice, i do have Avast and will review your suggestions and links...

 

 

David