Home Educate Yourself Solutions Portfolio About Us Careers Contact Us

The Village of Bawlf is extemely pleased with its relationship with Vital Effect. We have found Jeff and his collegues to be very efficient and timely in getting back to us when we need them and very patient and professional in explaining things to us. We highly recommend their services.

Mayor Jerry Iwanus

Photoshop Tips: CS2 - slow performance problem

By Robert Renman

How to make Photoshop run faster

I love Photoshop. I just love it. I have loved it for a very long time. Then I installed the CS2 version. Uh-oh, what's going on?

Photoshop gave me major performance problems. Just switching between the tools in the toolbar, trying to use the rectangular marquee would take seconds some times. Pretty much any action in the user interface would take up to a couple of seconds of waiting. Now this becomes very frustrating as you are trying to design something. Waiting for the tools to respond isn't funny. It felt like a step back to running Windows 95 on a system with 16 MB of RAM. Someone, please Help!

I went looking everywhere for a solution. I expected updating Photoshop would fix the glitch. Not so.

After searching on Adobe's website, following their recommendations in the support knowledgebase, my Photoshop was still running slower than ever. I was about to revert to version 7 instead.

I believe I have discovered how to solve the problem. I finally found a document on Adobe's site that explains the situation. It turns out that systems with more than 1 GB of RAM will have performance issues when running Photoshop. To make a long story short, the default settings when installing Photoshop CS2 is made for system with less RAM than 1 GB. So, what you need to do is to enable a plugin that will make better use of the RAM in your system.

Quit Photoshop if you have it open.
Locate the ~Bigger Tiles plug-in file - it is in Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS2/Plug-Ins/Adobe Photoshop Only/Extensions/Bigger Tiles
Rename the file, removing the tilde (~) from the file name.
Start Photoshop and you should see an improvement in performance.

I noticed a huge difference. Maybe the problem got worse because I have 2 GB of RAM installed, I am not sure.

I am happy that I finally got my " Old Photoshop" back - I was about to start ripping out the few remaining strands of hair on my head!

One final note: why didn't Adobe make a better installation process, so that the plug-in is automatically enabled if the system has more than 1 GB? Is that too obvious?

Adobe Support Knowledgebase

» Read the official support page from Adobe about these issues.