Photoshop CS4 is a disaster

b BINGO!!!

I just installed Daemon Tools Lite, some 1200 fonts, WinRar and ran an HP update. Installed Photoshop, and it's slow again. So it's one of those things. Perhaps more than one; we'll see shortly.

If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on a bad font due to the fact only some of you use Daemon, WinRar and have HP stuff, so I'll look into that first.

Don't go removing stuff of your computer just yet, folks. Let me see if I can pinpoint it first, and then whether removing works or if a format is necessary.

I'll keep you posted

>open printers in Control Panel and change that to something not on the network.

adobe has a pdf writer free for download. you can use for this...

>at a 3rd party plug-in folder or installed any plug-ins that conflict with CS4.

especially if you point it at an older photoshop installation...

Richard

Have you pointed CS4 at a 3rd party plug-in folder or installed any plug-ins that conflict with CS4.

That's known to cause problems like some of yours.

Hugh, Ill make sure I include the full description of the software and hardware configurations (before and after) in my report when Im done. Ill also make sure Adobe gets it too. I dont want to do it now, my posts are getting kind of long already with all this work, but I can point you to my posts #270 and #322 where you can get a rough idea. In short, my hardware is now the same as it was before (short of power supply, but we know that wasnt the issue now). Ill cover more about software and drivers. No firmware changes to anything, just a flashed BIOS.

Lawrence, I would prefer not to do this, but seeing no solution from Adobe as of yet I felt compelled to do something. Besides, some time ago I had a problem with CS3 (paragraph below) that I solved reading Adobe Photoshop forums. Time to give back.

Dave, the thing about the HP printer - that totally echoed with me given the whole thing with Photoshop being slow to open files when default printer is on a network. Which is that thing I would have never found out were it not for these forums.

Richard, you mentioned open fiasco. Do you have a network printer set as your default one? If you do, close Photoshop, open printers in Control Panel and change that to something not on the network. Then try Photoshop. That is likely going to speed up opening and creating new files dramatically.

If you have to print something, just choose a network printer from the print menu.

With regards to your other issues, you have something major going on there. How does your CS3 run in comparison, and has CS4 been like this from day one, or is this a new issue?

Erbs, Hugh, David, Dave and John, thank you for the feedback!

Im going back to work on the issue now.

rich, have you tried to reset your preferences? might clear up your open problem... crtl-alt-shift during startup... see the faq for full details.

I run a Intel quad core 6600 with 3.2 gigs of system ram and an Nvidia 8800 Ultra 768 megs of ram. Running on Vista 32 ultimate. I believe my machine is within Adobe's specs to run the program, yet I am experiencing the slowness like others. I have the latest video drivers, but I get a little bit better performance with the advanced/3d performance taken off in the preferences. CS3 runs as smooth as ever however. I am seeing very strange behavior leading me to suspect I may have a bad install though:

I can't even just "open" something, it's greyed out, I have to choose "open recent" and then "clear recent" to get the "open" option to appear.

Changes made to a photo or a project require that I either zoom in or out or resize via mouse drag to see the change.

Example: Once I go though the whole "open fiasco" and finally get a photo open, some strange things happen......I sometimes don't get a thumbnail in the channel/layers section. If I do get a thumbnail and I go to alter the photo like say levels or curves, the change won't happen until I either zoom or resize. Although I can see the change happen in the thumbnail if it's there.

Also, when I make a change, most of the time the "undo" is greyed out, which is weird. I can still do the "undo" via keyboard command though, but again, I have to zoom or resize to see the change.

Example: I will open a photo and have the channels/layer thumbnail there. Then switching to lab color I sometimes will lose the thumbnails, then after picking the lightness channel and bringing up unsharp mask, the display will just be checkerboarded and only when I hit the zoom percentage just under the display area in unsharp mask window will the picture come up. Then when I hit ok to that and it goes back to the main, I lose the thumbnails for RGB and Lightness, yet color channels A+B thumbnails are still there? Sometimes I will see the sharpen change, sometimes I have to do the resize/zoom thing. Then again, I'm still not out of the woods. I have to switch back to RGB now and guess what, all of a sudden "mode" is now greyed out?

Sorry for the long post, but this is very, very bizzare behavior and I'm wondering if anybody is seeing this? At this time I'm starting to think I have a bad install, even though no errors or messages came up in during the install other than that it was successful and finished. Also, I do not get any crashes or codes, so it seems stable from that point of view for me.

definitely install your spider pro early on. that's a key piece of your imaging workflow.

>If you can do it just install the drivers only (with Epson you can download them without the un-necessary bloatware that takes over the computer).

seconded!!!

If you can do it just install the drivers only (with Epson you can download them without the un-necessary bloatware that takes over the computer).

I'd do a restore point before installing the hp printer stuff ivan... just a hunch.