Optimum Performance settings for PS CS2

[Johnboy2978]

I finally got around to upgrading my old pc and have all of my photo editing software re-installed. I am currently running a PC with an intel 3.0 ghz core 2 duo processor (e8400), 4 GB of ram and 250 gb HD. It's been a while since I've been into tweaking and optimizing and have forgotten most of what I knew. What are the optimum settings both in the PS CS2 program itself and for WinXP to have it run as efficiently as possible?

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[mrodgers]

If it's a fresh install of WinXP, go to services.msc (in the start>run box) and disable the hundreds of crap that WinXP automatically starts up. When I first bought my PC, I had over 60 processes running upon initial startup. I have it wittled down to under 20 now.

XP will have a lot of stupid stuff auto starting. Stuff that goes out on the internet constantly for updates, programs half loading so that they "load faster" when you want to use them, etc. Problem with that is, so much is "half loaded" that the entire computer bogs down causing the programs to take longer to load.

Do you really need remote management automatically starting allowing someone to easily log onto your computer remotely? XP makes sure that feature is automatically started at every boot-up. Nice job on PC security there.

Right click on the taskbar, select the task manager and google for all the processes listed on the processes tab. You can determine which ones can be disabled from that. Use services.msc to find and disable them.

[Big Mike]

Thanks for that, mrogers, I think that's something I need to do.

As for photoshop, it should run faster if you have separate working and scratch disks...although, it sounds like your machine is pretty juiced so I don't know that you will really need to worry about speed.

[mrodgers]

Oh, and all that performance hogging stuff that I mention that XP defaultly clogs up, here's how it worked for me.

I specifically bought my machine for the sim racing that I do (www.lfs.net, the most realistic racing you can get short of going to a track yourself). When I fired the computer up, I found that I had around 8-12 frames per second (FPS) in the game. That is unplayable by a lot. After simply uncluttering all the unnecessary process of the default XP install, I bumped it from 12 to arond 90 FPS. That's all from the default XP install, so that tells you how horrible the default setup is.