Photoshop very sluggish

I've re-installed my previous Win2k system with WinXP and re-installed Photoshop CS.

However when using it now there's a big delay in it going away and doing something and then coming back to me. For example, open a pic and select the CROP tool then draw the marquee. There's then up to a 10 second delay in me being able to move the selection around with the mouse. The hard drive thrashes like mad.

I have checked the virtual memory settings in XP and also I've tried changing the primary scratch disk to my other HD all to no effect.

No hardware changes (have 512k DDR RAM), only WinXP has been installed. It is more than doubling the time it takes me to edit something

Any ideas please?

hi there,
i think your hard drive needs defragged. you might also check how much space you have free on your hard drives. i recently doubled my ram to 1gig and never noticed a great performance boost until i cleaned out my hard drive with (advanced uninstaller pro 2003) it actually freed up 27 gigs of hard drive space, you can get a 30 day free trial. xp and cs hog resources. click the link for some other info.
http://forums.techguy.org/archive/i...p/t-231399.html

Thanks for the reply. I have 50+Gb free on my primary drive and 100Gb free on my secondary. I will make sure that I defrag though, good point. I'm on 512Mb RAM so maybe it's the limit too, though it certainly was quicker on Win2k!

D.

well.. you could alsways try running PS in compatibility mode, for win2k.

It's just a thought..