Is PSE faster on duo computers?

[Charlie-Wisc.]

I use PSE 5. My computer is a 4 year old Dell, 1Gig RAM, etc. I am thinking about getting one of the newer computers. The "standard" today seems to be CPU's that are duo-core. By year's end, I hear, even quad-core CPU's will be available.

Does anyone know if PSE is programed to take advantage of duo (and eventually quad) CPU's? Is photo editing any faster; how about making slideshows?

[cats4jan]

I have a duo processor computer and two hard drives set up as redundant.

PSE runs pretty good - but still - now that I have so much "stuff" added into Elements - plus my hard drive is getting full - I can see a definite slowdown.

Wish I had set my hard drives up differently and I wish I gotten more RAM.

As Tim the Toolman Taylor would say - "I want MORE POWER."

[jlwilm]

Well,

I have heard that most programs out there are not yet taking advantage of Duo processors, let alone Quad.

You will get most bang for your buck by going up to at least 2G RAM, if not 3G. There have been several threads that have talked about this, butI think the summary was that 3 might not be fully used, but Elements would have all it needs.

If you are after performance, get a fast video card - elements isn't a game (obviously), but I was annoyed with how long it took to paint a picture - went upstream - 256M video card and it paints the image REMARKABLY faster.

Next, get a physically separate hard disk for scratch disks and set up editor to use it. This will split the work does when elements gets images and orks on them, although I have not seen a remarkable improvement in performance, and you can always try to install one later.

Big hard disk and keep it defragged and although it is not related to performance, invest in an external HD and back up to it.

[RobertSchuldenfrei]

Hi Charlie,

I believe it does make a difference. I keep a "widget" running in Gadget area of Vista. It shows the amount of CPU usage by CPU. When I use PSE both CPUs "dance" indicating that both are active. I can't prove it, but I think Vista does a good job of load balancing. Also, modern CPUs are "pipelined." This means that they can work ahead to improve performance. These are things that the OS can handle regardless of whether the application program "takes advantage" of the feature. PSE seems to be a fine grained program composed of some very small objects. This is a real plus for a sophisticated OS as it can keep multiple CPUs busy and balance the load.

This is just my guess, based on very little "real knowledge." :)

Cheers,

Bob

[vawitt]

I upgraded to a duo-core processor at the same time I bumped to 3 GB of RAM...personally, I think the RAM is probably more responsible for additional speed, although I can CTRL-ALT-DEL and look at the perf monitor and see both working.

RAM is so cheap these days (relatively speaking) that if you can load up your motherboard and see some real performance improvements.

Buying new RAM isn't as fun as a whole new computer, however... :D:D

~Val in rainy IL

[RobertSchuldenfrei]

Just another thought:

A week or two ago someone in this community suggested, very wisely, that disk speed was an important factor. Whenever PSE needs to offload RAM it is operating at disk speed! That is at least three orders of magnitude slower. Therefore consider not only the size of your disk, but the rotational speed (mine are 7200 RPM) and data transfer rate (300 MB/sec.).

Cheers,

Bob