<x-charset Windows-1252>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. - Turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use accurate subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for list instructions. </x-charset>