PSE 6 takes 4+ minutes to open photo - ideas?

[Squirrel]

Hi all, PSE newbie here. I got PSE 6.0 for my birthday and I'm having great fun so far.

But... even after Organiser taking ages to finish loading all my 10,000+ thumbnails, Editor is still taking at least 4 minutes to open a picture. I can have a game of Spider Solitaire while I'm waiting. :rolleyes: It doesn't seem to make any difference what size the photo is, or how many times it has previously opened it. I know it has a lot of stuff to load, but surely this isn't normal?

My laptop is a 2-year-old HPCompaq with a 1.86GHz Intel processor and 1Gb of RAM, recently defragged. It's running XP Pro SP2 and has nearly 4.5Gb free space. While it's opening a file, the CPU is up near 100% with the PhotoshopOrganiser process taking up nearly all of it.
I'm also running Kasperky Internet Security, but these processes don't seem to be hogging the CPU.

Any ideas from you wonderful experienced folks out there?

[Squirrel]

P.S. Sorry if I've posted in the wrong place. Maybe this should be in the Beginners' forum...?

[Bayla]

P.S. Sorry if I've posted in the wrong place. Maybe this should be in the Beginners' forum...?


Squirrel,

No this is fine, but you'll probably have to wait a bit for more people to wake up before you get an answer. It tends to be pretty quiet at this time of day as America is still asleep!!

Sorry I can't answer your question, but you've definitely come to the right place and there's bound to be someone who can!:)

Welcome to the forum!

Bayla

[kevq]

Squirrel,
Would suggest that you up your RAM to 2 Gb.
You should then notice an improvement.
Kev.

[Inspeqtor]

Hi Squirrel,

Welcome to the Village!

I am not a computer guru at all but I do have a question. What is the total size of your hard drive? It sounds to me like perhaps your hard drive is nearly full if you only have 4.5GB of free space and that might be your problem.

[ATR]

I would agree with both previous responses...look to the RAM and free hard drive space. When addressing RAM, look at the available RAM as well as the installed RAM.

The Photoshop Elements 6 Read Me cites 1.5 GB as a minimum amount of available hard drive space and you say that you have about 4.5 GB.
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402599&sliceId=1

Nonetheless 1 GB RAM (and we do not know how much is available) and 4.5 GB available hard drive space need upping.

Also, go to the Photoshop Elements 6 Editor, Edit Menu/Preferences/Performance. Check out how the Memory Usage is set up. Also you may gain a little by lowering the History States, down from 50. You may lose some "undos", but the gain may outweigh the loss.

How is your Virtual Memory set up? Have you optimized that or are you letting Windows make the decisions? As a first try, I think it is best to let Windows decide and take it from there. Have you optimized your system, clearing away old files with a program such as ccleaner, defragmented, etc.

ATR

[ATR]

Add on....

By any chance have you been doing a lot of System Restore operations? If so, you may have eaten up a lot of free hard drive space in the process. You can use the Windows Disc Cleanup Utility/More Options to take care of that, but you will lose restore points in the process. However, you will get back valuable free hard drive space.

ATR

[Squirrel]

Thanks ladies and gentlemen.

Inspeqtor,
My 75Gb HDD is partitioned into a 20Gb system drive (C:) which has 4.5Gb free and a 55Gb data drive (D:) which has 13Gb free. 4.5Gb is not enough? My paging file is up to 3Gb which I would have thought should be plenty?

Kevq,
Maybe I should go shopping this weekend!

[Inspeqtor]

Thanks ladies and gentlemen.

Inspeqtor,
My 75Gb HDD is partitioned into a 20Gb system drive (C:) which has 4.5Gb free and a 55Gb data drive (D:) which has 13Gb free. 4.5Gb is not enough? My paging file is up to 3Gb which I would have thought should be plenty?

Kevq,
Maybe I should go shopping this weekend!

I am not at home this week; I am at my daughters house in another state so I am not able to check out my computer. I have a 200GB hard drive with probably 100GB free space with 1GB Ram. There are times I wish I had more RAM, but most of the time 1GB is sufficient. I truly believe your problem is that you do not have enough hard drive space. When Windows runs, it uses alot of free space. If you can do this, I would suggest a new much larger hard drive would really help you out more than adding more Ram. Adding more Ram would help some.

Computer guru's: If I am wrong on anything here please step up to the plate and say so!

[NickLewis]

I disagree. I don't think this is a hard drive space issue or a shortage of RAM as such. You're meeting the standard Windows criteria for free hard drive space (>15%) on both partitions, & you've recently defragged. As far as RAM's concerned, I operated for years with only 1Gb - I've now got 2Gb - and never saw anything like 4 minutes to open a file in Editor.

I assume we're talking about ordinary camera files are we? Not huge image files from some other source?

Editor should be opening camera files in a few seconds. (For comparison, invoking an Editor session from within Organiser, i.e. Editor has to start up, then load a camera JPG, takes ~20 secs on my PC - a four year old 2.4GHz P4. A laptop will likely be slower because of the slower drives, but 4 minutes is just vastly too long.

Is this the total time it takes to initialise Editor and open the file, or is that how long it takes to open a file from within Editor, using File>Open - i.e. not invoking Organiser?

Also, does it behave like this if Organiser isn't running? Are there any other apps running? Do you get slow behaviour with any other apps?

Nick

P.S. I don't understand why Organiser is doing so much while a file is being opened in Editor..... You say you've only recently started using PSE. It's not still building thumbnail files in the background is it? Try just running Editor, with Organiser shut and see what happens.

[Bayla]

Nick,

I'm glad to see you write that, because my 80gb HD is partitioned in much the same way as Squirrel's and I have even less free space but it's certainly not taking my Editor so long to open an image, not even a many-layered psd file!

Bayla

[Inspeqtor]

Thank you Nick for setting the record straight. I should have left this to you in the first place... as I said "I am not a computer guru" :o

[Squirrel]

Apologies ATR, I posted at the same time as you did yesterday.

Thank you all for your suggestions! Here are the changes I've made, which seem to have improved things.

In Editor (Edit, Preferences, Performance) I've
a) added my D: drive (13Gb free) as my primary scratch disk and made the C: drive (4.5Gb) my secondary one.
b) changed the History States from 50 to 30.

According to this window, only 752Mb of my 1Gb RAM is available for use. I've had the back off the laptop and I have 2 x 512Mb 400Mhz chips, so I can upgrade to 2 1Gb 533Mhz chips max which surely must help. I'll be shopping tomorrow, or rather DH will love to do that for me!

Yes, the C: drive has recently been defragged, and the D: drive didn't need it. Windows makes the virtual memory decisions.

I have created a few System Restore points before installing our new HP printer, Kaspersky and PSE. However since being "infected" by Norton IS, none of my restore points have ever worked. I just do a backup to an external drive before installing instead. So I could almost certainly delete those without losing anything useful. :rolleyes:

Nick,
Yes, Organiser has finished creating all its thumbnails. That took a while! No other slow responses from other apps, although I was wondering about our new HP printer possibly causing delays if PSE needs to establish print settings on startup/load?

Yes, we're talking ordinary .jpg files taken with a Panasonic Lumix digital camera, between 1 and 3Mb in size.

So after making the changes, here are the times:
I just closed Organiser and did a File, Open in Editor and it opened a 2.91Mb file in 25 seconds.
It takes about the same to open Organiser.
And the same to open a (different but similar-sized) file in Editor from Organiser.
To open another file from Windows Explorer with PSE Editor takes... the same again!

OK, 25 seconds may not be whizzy quick but until I get my new RAM I can cope with that. It's consistent anyway.

Thanks again to everyone for your responses! If anyone's interested, I'll post the response times after the new RAM goes in. And there won't be ANY problems with the new RAM. It will be available, and will install easily, and will improve the speed. Are you listening "up there"? ;)

[NickLewis]

Hmmm. I'm a bit puzzled as to why opening a file from within Editor is taking the same length of time as having to open Editor up as well. A file the same size as yours opens from within my Editor in 4-5 seconds.

Did you notice what change caused the drop from 4 minutes to 25 seconds? You certainly should have the scratch disk on a different drive (preferably a different physical drive) from the program, but I'm not even sure Elements will be using the scratch disk just to open a 3Mb photo.

I believe slow printers, especially network printers can cause slow start up, but I didn't think they caused slow opening of files afterwards.

Odd.

Nick

[Squirrel]

The only changes I've made so far were the ones I mentioned at the top of my last post, as per ATR's suggestions in post #6.

And yes, I thought the printer thing was unlikely, but I'm clutching at straws here.

[NickLewis]

I'm baffled by why those changes would have had such a dramatic effect.

Especially since I've just looked at my Preferences only to discover that my scratch file was still on C:, with not very much more space than you've got. I must have forgotten to change the prefs when I upgraded to PSE6.

But messing about with my scratch disc settings and making draconian cuts in the amount of RAM available to PSE is having no visible impact on how long it takes Editor to open a file. :confused:

So I still think there must be something else going on. Perhaps fitting more (and of course, faster) RAM will ease that problem, but I don't think it's the root cause.

Nick

[johnrellis]

It could indeed be your printer -- others have had the Editor take 20-30 seconds to open a small JPEG, and changing the printer fixed the problem. For example:

http://www.elementsvillage.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34632&highlight=printer

It appears that PSE 6 queries the printer when it starts and when it opens a file, and if the printer is slow to respond, PSE 6 waits (this is sloppy programming on Adobe's part). This is more likely to happen with a network printer, but one person reported a problem with a local printer.

It's easy to troubleshoot: Add a new printer that prints to a file (e.g. Adobe's Generic Postscript Printer or the Generic Text Only printer bundled with Windows) and make that the default printer. Then try opening a file in the Editor.