RE: Windows XP Memory error while running Photoshop

"Laurie Solomon" <laurie@advancenet.net> · Tue, 30 Apr 2002 00:54:23 -0500

The pagefile, from what I have been told, use to be called the Swap file in
Win 98.  If you let Win XP install to default, it is probably installed on
your C drive and is set to let the operating system control its size
expanding and contracting its size as needed within the limits of available
contiguous free unfragmented space available on the drive that it is
located.  This file serves as the Operating System's "virtual memory,"
housing some temporary system files and some temporary application files
other than Photoshop related ones.  The "scratch disks" which you set in
your Photoshop preferences files as tot he number and location serve as
Photoshop's "virutal memory," housing Photoshop's temporary files.

There probably is not much you can do to speed things up apart from adding
more physical RAM, get a faster CPU, run only one program at a time with
only one file open at a time while closing any programs that might be
operating in background such as those displayed in the system tray, etc.  I
am not sure why you selected to format your drive as FAT 32 rather than as
NTFS, which is a much more reliable and efficient formatting scheme, in the
opinion of many including myself. Do you use your secondary drive for
anything other than the Photoshop Scratch Disks and if so are you
maintaining those scratch disks on partitions  by themselves or are you
using the same f=partions for other items besides the scratch disks?

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-epson-inkjet@leben.com
[mailto:owner-epson-inkjet@leben.com]On Behalf Of Artistic Photography
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2002 7:34 PM
To: epson-inkjet@leben.com
Subject: RE: Windows XP Memory error while running Photoshop

We are using Photoshop 7 on windows xp.  We have a secondary hard drive
formatted fat 32, and all our scratch disks are set to this drive.  I
don't know how to do anything about the page file whatever that is.  The
computer is an AMD 1200 MHZ with 512 meg of ram, the hard drives are
7200 rpm ata 100's.  Anything we could do to speed things up a little
would be appreciated, we just learned about turning off the scanner's
unsharp mask, that sped the scanning up a little.  Mike

Michael and Mary Messner
Artistic Photography
www.artistic-photo.com

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-epson-inkjet@leben.com [mailto:owner-epson-inkjet@leben.com]
On Behalf Of Laurie Solomon
Sent: April 29, 2002 1:16 PM
To: epson-inkjet@leben.com
Subject: RE: Windows XP Memory error while running Photoshop

Paul,

I am not a programmer so I cannot comment on what you have said or
propose; All I was attempting to do was to clarify the distinction
between the two in light of how they are actually set up to work
currently and not with respect
to what could be or might have been the case.   Just thought I would
make my
position clearer in case it was taken as saying Something other than I
intended..

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-epson-inkjet@leben.com
[mailto:owner-epson-inkjet@leben.com]On Behalf Of Paul D. DeRocco
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2002 5:35 AM
To: epson-inkjet@leben.com
Subject: RE: Windows XP Memory error while running Photoshop

I think PS uses its own scratch disks because it was first written for
OSes that had lousy virtual memory algorithms. I don't know what the Mac
is like these days (although it surprises me that people are always
talking about how much memory to manually allocate to different
applications), but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the Windows version
wouldn't work just as well, if not better, if they just stripped out all
the scratch disk crud, and relied upon the OS's virtual memory.

Of course, it's possible that the programmers at Adobe tried this, and
found it not to be true. But as a programmer, I can't see why Windows's
VM algorithms wouldn't work just fine on big images.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@ix.netcom.com

> From: Laurie Solomon
>
> I think that either you are getting confused or your statement is
> obscuring the difference between Photoshop's scratch disks and the
> swap files (virutal
> memory) of the operating system.  They are not the same and do
> not serve the
> same functions.  Photoshop does not really make that much use of the
swap
> file for its virtual memory but relies on its own scratch disks
> for virutal
> memory.  While I could be wrong, I believe that paging memory
> refers to the
> OS's virutal memory or swap file.  PS& may or may not make greater use
of
> the scratch disks than previous versions; but it does not make greater
use
> of the OS's swap file.

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