Desktop Refresh?!

[theslickvik]

For the past few weeks I've been noticing that whenever i close a big application like photoshop CS2 or even sometimes Microsoft word my desktop refreshes. I dont know what the problem is. I have 512mbs of ram and am running a P4 with a 3.00ghz setup. I cleaned out my C drive and rid it of cookies and all but no luck. My desktop background is the default Windows XP background. Any suggestions?

 

[xtknight]

Do you mean you see a noticeable flash on the desktop from refreshing and/or your icons get out of order? (Is the desktop refreshing causing something undesirable?)

 

[ProviaFan]

If you have only 512MB of RAM, it's probable that Photoshop has demanded enough memory while it was running that Windows had to toss your background image out of RAM - thus meaning that any time a portion of the desktop is revealed, Windows has to load the background from the disk again so it can repaint the desktop.

 

[theslickvik]

thats exactly what happens proviafan. Do you have a suggestion as to what i should do. Ram upgrade is out of the question however.

 

[ProviaFan]

You need more RAM, there's nothing much that can be done about it if your system is already fairly well optimized. Otherwise, you could do things that would save a MB or two of memory, such as picking a solid color instead of an image for your background, and trimming down the number of things that start up in your system tray. However, there's no free lunch, and you're not going to make Photoshop increase greatly in speed just by doing these small optimizations.

Edit: depending on how tightly you run your system, checking for spyware (and viruses, but you should be doing that already) would be a good idea. If your system is infected, then cleaning it out should actually make a noticeable and probably major impact on performance.