sanarita
October 10th, 2006, 01:51 PM
I got this tip originally from the book "How to Cheat in Photoshop" and have played around with the information. This discussion is for:
1. People with multiple hard drives on their computers.
2. People with the skill and inclination to buy a hard drive to add to their computers.
3. People who have a large enough single hard drive that they can afford the space to partition it into two hard drives.
If your computer contains a single drive, and you don't have a huge amount of extra room on it, then the default setting for your scratch disc is already fine and there is no need to consider changing it.
Here's the concept: Elements needs a lot of room to write temporary files while it is in use. The bigger the picture you are working on, the more layers and complexity it has, the more room is needed. If you leave the Scratch Disc setting at it's default, then Elements is forced to use your startup drive to write these files, and the lack of a large amount of dedicated space for the temporary files slows your program down. Temporary files are deleted when you close the application, so you would have so way to detect their existence.
Ideally, Elements should have a dedicated drive or drive partition for it's exclusive use when performing it's magic. Here's where the computer mechanics are urged to go out and buy a separate drive to install in their computers for a Scratch Disc. Second choice, use a program such as Partition Magic to create a large partition on one of your secondary drives. Third choice, get into the Scratch disc specifications and change them so that all your drives are called into use in your own specified order for these computations.
You get to the Scratch Disc dialog box by getting into the Editor and clicking Edit>Preferences>Plug Ins and Scratch Discs. By default, when you get there, you will find that the first choice for a Scratch Disc is Startup. If nothing else, then change this to specify one of your secondary drives by clicking the drop-down arrow. Then go ahead and change the second choice to one of your other drives and so on until you have given the Scratch disc permission to use space on all of the drives your computer contains. This will help.
If you have decided to get a separate Scratch Disc to put into your computer, or to partition off one of your drives, the question is: How big a space does the Scrtach Disc need? This is a good question. I went the partition route myself, and started with a 4 Gb Scratch disc. Since I build complex animations, 4 Gb turned out to be not adequate at all. I changed the partition size to 20 Gb, and have had no further difficulties. And using a scratch disc that is dedicated to Photoshop computations has sped up my computer considerably. A note of caution: if you use Partition Magic to resize the partitions on your hard drive, be sure to back up your drive first, because there is a danger, if you don't do it just right, that you can erase your old partition along with all the data it contains in the process of constructing your new parition!
If you have stayed with me this far, go ahead and reset your Scratch Discs, and enjoy the increase in computing power that results!
Helen
1. People with multiple hard drives on their computers.
2. People with the skill and inclination to buy a hard drive to add to their computers.
3. People who have a large enough single hard drive that they can afford the space to partition it into two hard drives.
If your computer contains a single drive, and you don't have a huge amount of extra room on it, then the default setting for your scratch disc is already fine and there is no need to consider changing it.
Here's the concept: Elements needs a lot of room to write temporary files while it is in use. The bigger the picture you are working on, the more layers and complexity it has, the more room is needed. If you leave the Scratch Disc setting at it's default, then Elements is forced to use your startup drive to write these files, and the lack of a large amount of dedicated space for the temporary files slows your program down. Temporary files are deleted when you close the application, so you would have so way to detect their existence.
Ideally, Elements should have a dedicated drive or drive partition for it's exclusive use when performing it's magic. Here's where the computer mechanics are urged to go out and buy a separate drive to install in their computers for a Scratch Disc. Second choice, use a program such as Partition Magic to create a large partition on one of your secondary drives. Third choice, get into the Scratch disc specifications and change them so that all your drives are called into use in your own specified order for these computations.
You get to the Scratch Disc dialog box by getting into the Editor and clicking Edit>Preferences>Plug Ins and Scratch Discs. By default, when you get there, you will find that the first choice for a Scratch Disc is Startup. If nothing else, then change this to specify one of your secondary drives by clicking the drop-down arrow. Then go ahead and change the second choice to one of your other drives and so on until you have given the Scratch disc permission to use space on all of the drives your computer contains. This will help.
If you have decided to get a separate Scratch Disc to put into your computer, or to partition off one of your drives, the question is: How big a space does the Scrtach Disc need? This is a good question. I went the partition route myself, and started with a 4 Gb Scratch disc. Since I build complex animations, 4 Gb turned out to be not adequate at all. I changed the partition size to 20 Gb, and have had no further difficulties. And using a scratch disc that is dedicated to Photoshop computations has sped up my computer considerably. A note of caution: if you use Partition Magic to resize the partitions on your hard drive, be sure to back up your drive first, because there is a danger, if you don't do it just right, that you can erase your old partition along with all the data it contains in the process of constructing your new parition!
If you have stayed with me this far, go ahead and reset your Scratch Discs, and enjoy the increase in computing power that results!
Helen