Photoshop CS4 is a disaster

JD,

I have both CS3 and CS4 installed to the same (C) drive, and CS3 still works fine. Like you, I must have a working copy of CS for business purposes.

Another poster here has suggested that installing programs on a different drive other than your system drive can cause problems. I've never tried it, so I wouldn't know about that.

A question for the forum:

A few weeks ago I tried to install the CS4 upgrade (currently running CS3, with a large number of extra Gradients, Styles, Actions, and plug-ins).

CS 4 had so many problems I uninstalled it (totally unusable).

I have now upgraded my video card to a much more powerful, higher end card from the Adobe Tested List as well as swapped out my 300 watt power supply for a 650 watt. My system is running beautifully with the hardware. Within a few days I will be doing a reinstall of CS4 and hopefully things will go much better.

My question is this: CS3, with all of its extras is installed on the C (system boot) drive. I have two additional internal harddrives, can CS4 be installed on one of those secondary drives, or must it be installed on the boot drive (C drive)?

For business purposes CS3 must be kept operational and intact with all of its extras and plug-ins.

I would also like to be able to work with CS4, try out the many settings changes and suggestions that have been submitted to the forum, see what extras and what plug-ins it will work with until Adobe can provide enough fixes to make the program functional and reliable enough to handle my business projects.

JD Curtis

Yeah, it's several years old, but it was pretty much state of the art when I built it. I've been toying with the idea of building a new one, but all the research into mobos, CPUs, etc., is daunting. Back when I built it, I was going through a stage of actually enjoying all the tinkering, but I guess my geekness has worn off. Now I just want something that works without me having to get under the hood.

> Unfortunately, not an option. It's an AGP card.

Must be an older system. That probably doesn't help :-(

Russell

Russell,

> I'd look to see if the videocard could be moved to another slot on the motherboard if another PCIe slot's available to try.

Unfortunately, not an option. It's an AGP card.

I'm seeing decent performance with OGL turned off in prefs, so I'll probably just wait and see if "the fix" fixes my problem.

Beyond that, I have a copy of Vista 64 that I can install at some point on that box. As I mentioned some time ago, I have CS4 installed on my other box, which is already Vista 64, and CS4 runs fine on it.

I suspect that if one runs CS4 on Vista 64, running an Intel Nehalem processor on a good x58 board, most problems will go away, but not all.

I know that manufacturing techniques follow the basic pattern establishing interchangeability of components, which ought to lead to units that run within spec, but it seems to me that we are almost back in the handmade age, where each production was unique.

I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that Adobe sees problems at the deep level that we will never observe ourselves. That is, it ain't perfect by a long shot!

It is my opinion that Adobe seriously needs two things:

Structured Exception Handling reports at the user level

A formal bug tracking system to which we can contribute such as Bugzilla.

David,

As mentioned earlier I replaced the fan with an Accelero S1 VGA Cooler as detailed at http://www.silentpcreview.com/article793-page1.html and it's very silent (just a 120mm fan running a low speed) and seems to be running very cool. Anyway.. at this point CS4 seems to be running ok under XP with just turning off those CS4 OpenGL options. I hope the few hiccups that remain will be resolved with a 'dot' release.

Nick,

If the image is disappearing while moving it about the way you describe I'd probably suspect a hardware conflict. I'd look to see if the videocard could be moved to another slot on the motherboard if another PCIe slot's available to try. I'd also pull out any other unnecessary cards that might be causing a conflict (just as a test). I'd also try running the system with only 2GB RAM to rule out any issues there.

It's possible that it's not a CS4 issue other than CS4 doing stuff that's exposing a hardware issue.

Russell

Russell,
The CC Panel does have some openGL settings that can be turned on and off. Also heat generation wise your card is just like my 4870. CS4 really puts my card to work and it heats up fast. The CC Panel has a option to speed up the cooling fan on your card to keep it cool when you stress it out.

> What version of OGL do you have? Have you started to play with the underlying driver OGL and 3D management settings?

I installed the latest v8.12 'driver only' which I downloaded from the ATI.AMD.com website. I do not install anything from the CD that comes with the videocard as it's usually old before the product ships.

I did not install the Catalyst Control Center as I've learned from past experience that it offers little benefit and just adds additional overhead with stuff that runs in the background. Much of the junk can be disabled (see: http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_1.html ) but I find it's just easier to avoid it altogether.

Here's the card info link at Sapphire's website:

http://www.sapphiretech.com/us/products/products_overview.php?gpid=219&grp=3

I assume this page has the OpenGL version info you're asking about. Though I have only turned off stuff in Photoshop's own OpenGL preferences menu and without the Catalyst Control Panel I don't think I can change anything else.

FWIW: When I move images around the screen (with XP) the image remains visible at all times. Though when I release the mouse at the end of the move there is a slight flickering that I've never seen with any pervious versions of PS. The flickering does not occur with the OpenGL feature turned off in PS Preferences. This is with an 11 layered RGB image (including 2 text layers) that weighs in at 308mb (40.9mb when flattened).

Russell

Hugh,

This PC is XP Pro, SP3, Opteron dual-core processor, 4 GB RAM, video card is HIS ATI Radeon X1950 Pro which supports Shader 3.0 and OGL 2.0.

With OGL enabled in prefs, this happens with any image that is opened, from web graphics to poster-sized, and with Bigger Tiles enabled or not. I despise Documents as Tabs, so it's been disabled from the first.

Nick