Photoshop CS4 is a disaster

You need more than opinions to make it safely to the end of the trail, Charley.

I don't think it has nearly as much to do with Vista or the video drivers or the other file updates as it has to do with a terrible code relase by Adobe with horrible QA or QA indifference. I can tell you that CS2 runs great on the same o/s and config parameters and CS4 runs terribly slow and has all the problems that users are experiencing like the Marquee tool way behind the actual mouse drag.

I, too, have been installing Photoshop (and most other programs, except utilities and Windows components) in D:\Program Files\* for years without problems. It worked fine in CS, CS2, CS3, and CS4. Some versions insisted on installing some components (e.g., Bridge) on C:, but there have been no problems with installs on a drive other than C:. There darn well ought not to be any problems, because any installer that hard-codes a C: location will fail hard on systems that don't have that location available. And while it is very common — and indeed default behavior — for a Windows install on a pristine machine to have C: be the system disk, that is far from being universal, so it is exceedingly unwise for an installer to make such an assumption.

The people with problems were probably running non-NT OSes.

I have too. i think it's good advice for people with problems.

I'll shut up then. I have read of problems some of which have been blamed on non-standard installations and/or moving things around.

I usually install it on a separate drive too. d:\ n my case.

JJ: I have been installing Adobe apps on a separate drive for years without any problem whatsoever, never ever, never never...... ever!

Thanks for the clarification, JJ. I was thinking it was you who posted about it.

It is definitely inadvisable to install Photoshop anywhere but the default location on C:\.

Some people like to take control of where things are installed but, with so many dependencies on other system directories, it can often lead to malfunctions or poor performance.