# CS3 PhotoShop very slow



## adthrawn (May 15, 2007)

All of the other apps with CS3 run fine on my Vista machine, but PS lags a lot and often will freeze up all together. Do you know why, and are there any fixes?


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## lister (Aug 10, 2004)

PS likes a lot of RAM, and also like a decent sized scratch disk. What's yours like?


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## adthrawn (May 15, 2007)

A gig of RAM...not sure about the cache size. Where would I find that info?


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## ferrija1 (Apr 11, 2006)

Press Alt+Ctrl+shift while Photoshop starts to reset the prefs.


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## slipe (Jun 27, 2000)

Edit > Preferences > Plug-Ins and Scratch Disk. It has been quite a few versions back since there was a size setting for the scratch disk. You now just tell it which drive you want to use for the primary and secondaries. Once it fills the primary it spills over to the secondary. If you have a second physical drive everything runs faster if you assign it as the primary.

Also go to Memory and Image Cache and increase the RAM Photoshop can use. Keep in mind that you are only letting it take a percent of the RAM that isn&#8217;t being used when you start the program. That isn&#8217;t a percentage of the total RAM. With a Gig of RAM I find 80% works pretty well unless you have documents you want to scan at high resolution with Photoshop running or have another program you run concurrently like Illustrator. The default is usually too low IMO.


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## adthrawn (May 15, 2007)

I will try this when I get back to my desktop.


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## wilson44512 (Mar 25, 2006)

i have CS2 and it was running slow. but it ran much better after setting the Scratch Disk. to my second hard drive.


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## adthrawn (May 15, 2007)

I don't have an option to change the size of the scratch disk. Just opens to a menu asking about plug ins, which I have none installed. Same goes for the memory and image cache.


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## ferrija1 (Apr 11, 2006)

Try Edit > Preferences > Performance.


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## lister (Aug 10, 2004)

There is no option to change the size of the scratch disk (never has) in Photoshop; you need to create a partition on your (2nd) drive to the desired size (eg; mine is set to 30gb - large files) via Windows and then select that partition in the preferences.


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## wilson44512 (Mar 25, 2006)

this is how i change the scratch disk and memory in CS2


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## Noyb (May 25, 2005)

Here's the CS3 Version in W-XP ....


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