speed sloww elements 5

[moosecamper]

Good Morning everyone,
I have a question on the speed of elements. It doesnt seem to matter if I just open elements or have been working in it, it is sooo slow. When you save your work it takes a good minute or two to complet. Is this normal?
I just received my first elements magazine yesterday, havent had a chance to look at it yet. I hope it is informative..
I Have changed my monistor and printer colors to match now, so hopefully that will help printing. thanks Norma

[troush]

What are your system specs?

Did you disable antivirus when you installed? (This is very important to do.)

-Trish

[moosecamper]

Trish,
I dont know if I disabled anti virus, if I didnt do I need to do a complete uninstall and reinstall? Oh I hope not, all my pix will not be in the catalog than.
Specs are slow, 528 somewhere close is the memory, this seems to be where the problem is.
I am trying to figure out a way to buy a fast inexpensive hard drive processor, I don't know if it will be worth it yet, I dont believe my laptop can be added to for memory, I will need to check that out.
thanks for your suggestion. Norma

[NickLewis]

Norma,

Your catalogue shouldn't be affected by an uninstall/reinstall. The new installation should just pick up your old catalogue.

Nick

[moosecamper]

I will give it a try tonight when I get home. Maybe that will help. I hope so.
thank you Norma

[LeeOtsubo]

...Specs are slow, 528 somewhere close is the memory, this seems to be where the problem is.
I am trying to figure out a way to buy a fast inexpensive hard drive processor, I don't know if it will be worth it yet, I dont believe my laptop can be added to for memory, I will need to check that out.
thanks for your suggestion.
Most new (less than 2 y/o) laptops use standard SO-DIMM memory chips so adding memory should be no problem. If you currently have 512MB, you probably have two 256MB modules taking up both memory slots. You'll have to throw away a 256MB module and replace it with a 512MB to get to 768MB but a better solution would be to throw out both 256MB modules and buy 2x512MB modules for a total of 1024MB (1GB). That should cost about $120 these days.

If by "fast inexpensive hard drive processor" you mean an external hard drive (HD), you won't see any speed increase unless you move your data files (My Documents folder) to the HD and free up scratch space on the internal C: HD. Any external HD is very slow compared to an internal HD. By moving your data files to the external HD, you can use the free space on your internal C: HD as a temporary storage area for PSE. PSE uses extra HD space to store temporary and intermediate results so it doesn't run out of RAM (memory).

In order of speed, cache memory is the fastest but most limited (~2MB-8MB) and you can't add cache. Next is RAM (random access memory, ~256MB-2GB) which will give you that biggest "bang for the buck". After that comes HD space (anywhere from a few GB to 100s of GB). The cpu (central processor unit) stores things in different areas depending on how soon it "thinks" it might need it again.

Now you know how to design a PC system! :D

Lee Otsubo
www.thedigitalphotoguy.com