Photoshop CS4 is a disaster

It would be interesting to hear what the Adobe engineers here really think about all this, but I'm pretty sure they have guidelines about what they can and cannot talk about.

>I guess that's the answer then. If you want to run CS4, you need to install it on a brand new computer with little or nothing else installed on it.

I'm sure that plays into it, but for most people it's just not practical to have a machine completely devoted to just PS.

I have two machines in my office. One for work (PS and other professional apps, and one for play (email, web surfing, whatever). When I installed CS4 on my work box, I got (and still have) all the lagging, disappearing window content, etc. (Both are XP Pro)

Over Thanksgiving holiday, I picked up a good deal on a Vista 64 machine at Costco. 500GB HDD, 4GB RAM. The idea was to use it to replace my aging play box. When I hooked it up, all I did was uninstall a Norton trial, then install PS CS4. It ran like a champ. No lagginess, no window content problems. CS4 booted in about 3 seconds and everything about it is faster than CS3.

OK, so the next step was to migrate the contents of my old play box onto the new Vista machine. That went without a hitch (mostly) using an app called PCmover that came with the machine. Even with the addition of the rest of the contents of of my old play box, CS4 still runs fine. This, on a machine with only one hard drive and mobo-integrated (nvidia) GPU.

Unfortunately, the new play box won't be suitable for pro PS work. It's limited to 4GB RAM, and at the price I paid for it, it just isn't very robust or expandable.

I'm not happy about the way CS4 runs on my work box, but I'm willing to give the guys a chance to fix it. If, after that, it still works the way it does now, I will be very upset to hear more of this "Update your drivers" stuff.

What you ignore, Basil, is that I had no bad result installing this CS4 update on an old computer running under XP.

Not my XPS 400 nor my 730 are dedicated systems.

Stupid response . . . David.

Others might judge otherwise.

I guess that's the answer then. If you want to run CS4, you need to install it on a brand new computer with little or nothing else installed on it.

Or to put it another way, when you upgrade your computer, that's the time to upgrade the Adobe software. At other times, forget it.

However eventually you will want to use your computer for something else, or you will install some new hardware, or a new security package, and that whateveritis disagrees with the Adobe software and the Adobe software breaks never to run properly again.

Should we really need to run Adobe Software on a dedicated computer isolated from all other apps? It goes against the philosophy that computers should be general purpose tools running eclectic software that is resilient and tolerant and reliable.

I think the next step might be for Adobe to write their own OS especially to suit their own products. How much better would they run then??? Other conflicting apps could then be prevented from being installed.

Then they can control the hardware too.

Or maybe they should simply go back to the Macs they came from.

My point is that if you write software for PCs, it should run properly on all PCs meeting a general minimum specification, irrespective of the brand of computer or processor or graphics card or what other software or hardware is installed on it. That is what PCs are all about and it is what the software should be about too!

I'm not ... a really happy... Adobe customer ... not really, not ... at all.

>What would I be looking for?

blu ray discs to play in your hot new blu ray drive! :)

> I copied/typed in every description from the Dell invoice.

I figured. it's funny they can't even spell the name of the stuff they're putting in. wait... the drives themselves, they're not really colored "blue" are they?!! :)

Why would I be doing "amazon searches?"

What would I be looking for? :-)

In my defense, poor as it might be, I copied/typed in every description from the Dell invoice. Those Googling stuff are on their own.

Good news is, for me and folks like me, Dell/Adobe products appear to be what I hoped they might be . . .

There are no installation problem with CS4 Master collection on any computer I own.

On my XPS 400 with a Nvidia 7900GS running under Windows XP SP3, things were kinda slow, but not so much as to universally support the perceived faults with Photoshop Cs4 or with 4's support for GPU acceleration.

This is all so very technical stuff way beyond me. I only know what my machine does on the monitor in front of me . . . and what I report back.

Unlike CS3, I have experienced no monstrous installation problems at any time and no client use problems once the installation was sucessfully installed.

I'm really . . . so far . . . a really happy . . . Adobe customer.

>Blueray RW Drive

>Blue-Ray Disk Playback

blu-ray. ;)

(the correct spelling will make your amazon searches better! XD have fun!!!)

Finally received my new computer.

Without incident, successfully installed CS4 Master Collection. No lags, no flickers, no ghosting. Thus far, no problems of any kind.

Dell XPS 730 H2C
Intel Core2 Extreme processor QX9650
Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 32-bit
Memory: 4GB DDR3 SDRAM, 2.5GB addressable
Motherboard 7-slot ATX (NVIDIA 790i Ultra SLI chipset)
Dual NVidia GeForce GTX 280 cards 1024MB (Driver version 177.40
CPU Liquid/TEC Cooling-ATX
1 kilowatt power supply
X-Fi PCI Sound Card
Two SATA 2 Harddrives at 7200 RPM
Blueray RW Drive
DVD-RW
Two external USB drives

Monitor: Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP set to native 1920 x 1200

Pre-installed software:
McAfee Security Center 9.0
Microsoft Office 2007 Professional
Roxio Creator 10.2 Premium - Blue-Ray
Power DVD 8.0 Blue-Ray Disk Playback

I think the fact that this is post #451 in this thread kinda speaks for itself.

Hugh H,

Thanks for the response. See my comments below.

Firebomb,

In some respects your settings improve performance in Stonehenge (faster-more responsive painting BUT there is still a very slight but nevertheless annoying lag of paint application following cursor location) but image flicker when moving images around the screen is still present. Horizontal Type Tool shows virtually no lag but it was the same (ie improved by Stonehenge) before adopting your settings.

In original (11.0) PsCS4 they made no improvements (image flicker persists, bad lag with painting, horrible lag with Horizontal Type Tool) but one noticeable change.

With several (6) images open I used to get a ghost image (lasting up to 1 second) remaining behind when dragging one of the images from one screen location to another but the move was instantaneous. With your settings, no more ghost images but the move now lags behind the cursor and there is no movement of the image at all for about 1 second. Simply unusable.

I also used to have (even in Stonehenge as well), and still have with you settings, this problem. With 2 single-layer images (average size 95 MB) zoomed to 100% within the working space (all panels and menus visible), Ctrl Tabbing between them results in a very slow redraw of each image about 1/2 second delay, always producing blur and sometimes (intermittently) showing transparency during the redraw.