General Question

anartist's avatar

Is there any way to fix my Photoshop?

Asked by anartist (14808points) July 1st, 2011

It may be a memory problem, but it started recently and seems to be increasing. Not just the slow load [I can live with that] but functionality decrease. Simple, like cursor shapes not showing, or complex and problematic, like the magic wand tool functioning erratically, if at all.
I have an older computer, which I basically like, but it is limited to 2 gig memory and its video card is not separate but part of Intel chipset. I have snallish hard drive 80 gig but large MyBook [terrabyte]. What can I do to fix?

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7 Answers

funkdaddy's avatar

some ideas

> restart
> shut everything else down
> work with smaller images unless you really need the resolution
> Photoshop doesn’t free up memory when you close a file, it only does when you close the whole program
> Photoshop works with a huge scratch file stored on your drive and you can configure where it’s stored in the preferences. If you’re storing that on the remote drive you might try to free up the room on your main drive instead, it could very well be faster because of faster access.
> Things you copy and paste will stay in memory usually at least until replaced with something else

Once Photoshop starts to get wonky it just gets worse so I usually find a good stopping point, save my file, and restart everything ASAP when that happens.

Hope it helps.

anartist's avatar

I’ve tried much of this already but will try again. I did increase the scratch file on MyBook ]F drive] and slightly decrease it on C and change the order of preference so F is first and C second. Almost everything on C is program files—the only chunk of any size I can remove is downloads.
Still it is preferable to have main scratch on C?

ratboy's avatar

“Still it is preferable to have main scratch on C?”

Yes, it is. The scratch file is acting as an extension of RAM, and writing to disk is already much slower than writing to memory. Forcing everything to go through a USB port slows everything considerably more. Adding an internal HDD would probably speed things up some.

anartist's avatar

Given that this is a Gateway Profile 5.5 a second internal drive is not possible—but maybe I can get a bigger C. I love its tiny elegant footprint and won’t change until I can find similar.

krrazypassions's avatar

Have you tried reinstalling?

bpfo3453's avatar

Try reinstalling Photoshop and then restarting.

anartist's avatar

I guess that’s the next step after I finish trimming out unnecessary files in my downloads, unnecessary programs, etc. * groan *

-thanks all!

My InDesign is beginning to crap out too.

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