Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements 6 runs SLOW!!!!!!!!

[DetConan]

Hi,

Here is my config :

CPU : Athlon X2 - 4200 (s939)
GPU : 7600 gt
RAM : 4 x 512 DDR

1 - My wife like to use Photoshop and Premiere Elements to make some slideshows with lot of effects. But the performances of the computer are very sluggish. Is it normal ? What could be done to help her ?

2 - She would also want to buy a camcorder, buy not an HD one. She would then use Elements to make some video editing of our travels. In that case, would we really need to change computer ?
Would a Phenom X4 955 would run Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements very fast, even for slideshows with lots of effects ? Or do my wife would need a i7 Core 920 to really enjoy her pastime ?

Thank you for your insight.

 

[mpilchfamily]

You'll need more power. Photoshop and Premiere are very CPU and RAM dependent. Mainly its all about the RAM. Your current CPU is more then sufficient but you would get better performance with more RAM. Also a slower HDD will delay the speed at which the programs load.

 

[imported_Mills]

Sluggish as in poor UI response time or slow to execute tasks? Was it always like that or is this just lately? Has her 'workload' changed much? In other words, is she working with much higher res pictures/video?

I'd simply keep an eye on taskmanager as she works (sort by CPU usage), and if something in the background is grabbing significant CPU time, address that and see whether performance becomes adequate. If elements is the only thing using any significant CPU, then I'd look into upgrading.

That system, in my opinion, should be good enough for editing SD video, but you can probably improve your speed dramatically with a small investment. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=35&p2=88 should give you a pretty good idea of the magnitude of improvement. I would say with certainty, though, that you don't /need/ an i7 system to edit SD video. Whether the speed is worth the investment is completely up to you.

Mills

 

[GaryJohnson]

An X2 4200 w/ 2GB a RAM should be good enough for consumer image / video editing.

You may have a lot of background processes that are slowing things up, or there may be some operating system settings that could be changed to improve performance.

It would help to know what operating system you are running and to see a HijackThis logfile.

 

[DetConan]

I am using Windows XP. Elements is slow to execute tasks. Specially when my wife tries some special transitions effects between photos in the slideshow.

My hard drive is a Western Digital WD1200JS. 7200 RMP (i think). But the fact that it is almost full (i just have 15 gb left on this 120gb disk...) might not help either, i presume...

 

[Blunc]

add another hard drive immediately, move as many files as you can to the new drive and hope the WD drive doesn't die before you make some room on it.

after you get files moved from C drive, defrag.

after that set Premiere (preferences) to do the video projects on the second drive.