indesign 2024 - slow on Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop.

Report · Feb 17, 2024

am writing to express my disappointment regarding the performance of INDESIGN 2024 19.0 on my Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop.

My laptop specifications include an Intel Core i5 8th generation processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. Despite these decent specifications, I am encountering significant slowness while working on the digital planner project in INDESIGN.

The software seems to lag frequently, making it challenging to accomplish tasks efficiently. This slowdown is hindering my workflow and causing frustration.

I would appreciate any guidance or assistance you can provide to optimize the performance of INDESIGN on my laptop. If there are any updates, settings adjustments, or recommendations you can offer to improve its speed and responsiveness, I would be grateful.

Report · Feb 17, 2024

In my view these specifications are simply not that decent. 8GB RAM is barely enough to keep InDesign afloat, in my experience.

Also, how much free room do you have on that SSD?

Report · Feb 17, 2024

120 GB

Report · Feb 17, 2024

I'm running a desktop with not dissimilar specs, and while I can notice that 2024 is rather slower & more bloaty-feeling than 2023, it still runs okay. The main differences between our machines are:

a) I have essentially the slowest possible cheap replacement SSD, it simply must have a lower read speed than whatever Lenovo was putting into their X1 Carbon Thinkpads

b) I have an eighth-gen i7, not an i5

c) I have sixteen gigs of RAM

We're both overdue for a hardware refresh, and I thought for a minute that I could suggest that you put off the hardware purchase for another year, if you put another eight gigs of RAM into your Thinkpad. However, if I'm right about you having a 7th or 8th gen Thinkpad X1 Carbon, your RAM is soldered to the motherboard and cannot be expanded.

The only userpace software tweak that I have personally seen cause meaningful performance improvements in InDesign is to limit the number of fonts installed on your system. In my experience, that only really affects the speed of the Character panel, unfortunately. Also if you are working over a network, then moving your working files to your SSD might get you a bit of a speed boost. Quitting absolutely everything else might also help, in an attempt to free up some more RAM.

Unfortunately, my experience is exactly the same as that of @leo.r; eight gigs will let you run InDesign. Barely.

Report · Feb 17, 2024

INDESIGN 2024 19.0 on my Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop.

My laptop specifications include an Intel Core i5 8th generation processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD.

By @aghanjar16430960

You computer is not high enough spec.

It's decent. back in the day.

8th gen is 2017 - 7 years old to date.

i5 is a lower end processor slightly better an i3 and worse than i7/i9

8Gb ram is too low - you need much more like 16 or even 32gb RAM

256gb SSD is very small for todays demands.

2 things you can do

Depending your exact processor model and motherboard - you could possibly upgrade to 16 or even 32gb RAM

And you could potentially upgrade your SSD to a larger hard drive - 1tb would be good.

Sorry to say - performance your facing is due to your technology being over 7 years old.

It's crazy to thing 2017 is so long ago - even 2019 is now half a decade away.

Report · Feb 18, 2024

Just to add to what others said - your laptop is an "ultraportable" thing with "U" CPU designed for long battery life - it's good for browsing Internet and overall office jobs - but not exactly powerhouse for working with InDesign.

Not to mention that 8GB is just enough to boot Windows...

Report · Feb 19, 2024

and what about amd ryzen 5 4600g 3.7 ghz with radeon graphics its perfect for working on InDesign

thanks

Report · Feb 19, 2024

and what about amd ryzen 5 4600g 3.7 ghz with radeon graphics its perfect for working on InDesign

thanks

By @aghanjar16430960

How that relates to your laptop?

Personally - not a fan of AMD.

Report · Feb 19, 2024

it's a desktop pc

Report · Feb 19, 2024

it's a desktop pc

By @aghanjar16430960

But you were complaining about laptop?

Report · Feb 20, 2024

YescI know I will transfert my work to my desktop rayzen

Report · Feb 18, 2024

8th Gen i5? 8GB RAM?

That is an underpowered computer for InDesign. My guidance is to buy a new one. Yours is somewhere in the neighborhood. 5-7 years old.

That said, the current version of InDesign 2024 is 19.2.

Report · Feb 19, 2024

and what about amd ryzen 5 4600g 3.7 ghz with radeon graphics its perfect for working on InDesign

Report · Feb 19, 2024

Lower end processor but you still need at least 16GB of RAM to run InDesign decently.

Report · Feb 20, 2024

It's all about single core speed and having at least 16GB of ram. Older and low-end cpus simply don't have the oomph to power through ID and AI tasks. Neither do massively-multithreaded CPUS, with the exception of the last two generations of Threadrippers or Xeons. A good i7/i9 of the last 3 generations, or Ryzen 7/Ryzen 9 of the last two generations will make things much better. Even the 5 year old i7 9700k I use at my day job is decent enough, but newer chips are much better. The M3 Apple cpu is a champ, if you don't mind changing ecosystems. If you are able/forced to upgrade memory, get as much as you can afford. Even 16GB is barely enough now. I sometimes run out of memory with 32GB at my day job, since I don't like to use a pagefile with nand ssds. I bought an Intel Optane dc5800x for home use as a pagefile and ultra-reliable storage for sensitive information. That's a little extreme, I'll admit.

Report · Feb 20, 2024

[...] Even 16GB is barely enough now. I sometimes run out of memory with 32GB at my day job, since I don't like to use a pagefile with nand ssds. I bought an Intel Optane dc5800x for home use as a pagefile and ultra-reliable storage for sensitive information. That's a little extreme, I'll admit.

By @frazzlesnap

I have a laptop with 16GB RAM and SSD - so PageFile is off - never run out of memory...

But on the "beast" - I can create RAM-disk and no SSD will be faster:

Report · Feb 22, 2024

Yikes! I hope to upgrade my home system to 512GB some time this year. I only run out of RAM at work because I like to have Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Command Workstation, Outlook, Firefox, and a few other programs all going at the same time. Windows 10 and 11 are very stupid, so they won't free up memory when I close a large file in Photoshop, for instance, unless I close Photoshop and reopen it. I can't blame that on Adobe. I was pretty happy at home getting 25/18GBps out of my RAID10, but Windows broke it, and now I can't get better than 16/12GBps. A RAM-disk is defintely faster!