Major PSE Problems!!

[kel3120]

I'm really hoping someone can help me figure out what is wrong! I have had PSE 6.0 on my laptop for a few months and didn't really have many problems with it. A few weeks ago it started to get to get really slow and it was taking forever to get layouts done. I had a lot of junk on my computer, so I decided to just reformat and start fresh (this was 2 weekends ago)...

Now it has been a little over a week, and PSE is running slower than ever. It will have a bar showing progress when I just try to resize an element or if I move something it will think a long time and reload the whole page. I checked the CPU usage and it is at 99 for PSE when I'm working on something. It is to the point where it feels unusable.

I tried to do some research to see if there was something I could do to fix this. The only thing I did was change the setting for RAM usage to 80% and reduce the number of changes it remembers (for the undo's) from 50 to 25. I did not notice any difference from these changes.

I'm just not sure what the problem could be since it had worked okay when I first starting using it. Any ideas?

[goldscraps]

OK, I'm not a PSE expert, but I do know PS and when the regular version of Photoshop acts like that, it's usually because my hard drive is too full or my paging file is inadequate.

Check your scratch disk location under Edit->Preferences->Scratch disks and plugins in PSE. Make sure it's set to a drive that has a t least 5 GB of free memory. Photoshop and PSE will use your hard drive as virtual memory. That would be my first guess.

You could also try increasing your windows paging file size. My husband did that on my computer and it made a huge difference. In XP, you right click on "My Computer" and choose properties. Then select the Advanced tab and click the settings button. Choose the advanced tab again and then click the change button under virtual memory. Make sure the paging memory for your main drive is set at least twice the amount of RAM your computer has. I have 2 GB of RAM, so my paging file is 4048 MB. Maybe these will help you. :)

[kel3120]

Thanks for the suggestions. The scratch disk was set to my C drive, and that has 13 GB of free space, so that wasn't the issue.

I tried increasing the virtual memory setting, but it was only below by 500 MB. Didn't seem to make a difference, but I'm wondering if I need more RAM. Right now I have 1.24 GB and PSE says I only have 758 MB available.... I know the system requirements for the program are less than this though.

Any other ideas?