Optimizing my laptop for Photo editing.Squeezing the juice out of the rock!

[rob25]

The Laptop is an Acer 7720g
C2 duo t5550 1,83 ghz, 3 gb ram,
Nvidia 8600m gt 512 vram
1 hd- Toshiba 160 gb os+apps
1 hd- WD 320 bevt: 1 partition 35 gb for scratch, 2 nd partition photos.

?.Will upgrade to 4 gb ram, & considering for the future when ssd gets cheaper to implement an express54 card with 30 gb for PS scratch.
: also considering changing the 160 Toshiba for a faster drive, maybe a Seagate 320 7200.3 or a wd 320 bekt.

(Currently work with an external 22" hp monitor in dual mode , & wireless mouse & keyboard for home use. Will be adding a more powerful tower pc only because stitching & hdri requires it.)

I have just Changed My laptop to vista 64 , it took me over 3 days, I had to learn all about mbr & crap that I really never wanted to know, trying to get the ah heck to boot.
I now have it all optimized, Vista 64, cs4, autopano pro & photomatix, I notice a hell of a difference in photoshop cs4, The brush tip no longer lags & autopano seems faster too.
The only real lag I find is in bridge cs4, when you press space bar to see the full screen image it is ok but then when you click to zoom in it takes about 3-7 sec to load.

The first drive I use for os & apps , I only use less than 40 gb.
On the second drive I created a first partition (Considering that the outermost part of the disk is the fastest.) of 30 gb for scratch & a second partition for Photos.

Conclusions.

1. You don?t need an extremely powerful cpu,or gpu to run Photoshop cs4 for average photo use, if you can afford it better .The only reason why I am considering a more powerful pc is because I have got into stitching panoramas & Hdri photography & when merged the files are 1,5 to 3 gb open in photoshop when a normal 10mp shot from my d80 is about 100 mb open in photoshop. So when you apply filters etc. , its a bit slow.

2. The difference that a 64 bit OS makes is quite outstanding.

3. Setting up your HDs, or acquiring the right HDs for each purpose is highly undervalued.
Consider what disk will be moving large files (throughput) & what disk will be faster for apps (i/o).( Please someone correct me if I am wrong, this is my interpretation of what i have been investigating.)
Try to have OS, scratch & data on different disks.
Make sure you are regularly defragmenting especially you data disks.

4. Optimize your OS, you can tweak a bit by:

a. optimize your windows processes & services.( Google that.) It helps optimize your ram so you don?t have any unwanted processes hanging around waiting & taking up resources. Don?t let new apps install anything on your toolbar, apart from necessary antivirus etc.

b. control panel/system/system properties/advanced - performance - settings _( I have mine on let windows decide, don?t really like the visual of performance.)

Optimizing yourself.(Workflow.)

Consider learning camera raw in cs4 very well & you will find you speed up your workflow tremendously. (Lynda.com has a great tutorial on this & many other subjects.)
You will be working in a non destructive manner & you will find yourself only going into photoshop for more complex editing.

Once you have fresh configured your os & apps make a drive image on an external disk or dvds, if you ever have any sort of problems you just mount the image on a hd & it is the way you saved it with all your serials ,drivers ,tweaks etc...
It only takes less than a couple of hours as opposed to days.

I hope this info might have helped someone & if you have anything to add or correct please be my guest .😉

 

[Billb2]

You might want to look into RAIDed drives.

 

[heymrdj]

RAID 0+1, 5, or 6 with some high speed SSD drives 🙂.

 

[rob25]

raid 0/1 seems interesting for pcs, but having only 2 disks in the portable I would not dare in raid 0 without raid 1. 😛
Thisis something Ive never tried, how complicated is it?

 

[specialk90]

Hi Rob.

Raid is not complicated at all. It is rather easy to set up. I can tell you from my own experience what works great with CS4, Bridge & PS especially. I have 4-150GB Raptors in Raid 10 for OS/Apps/Storage and a Raid 0 for scratch disk/media cache. I actually think you should be able to setup Raid on your laptop since it is Intel and has 2 drives. Look for Intel Matrix Raid program which will allow you to create a Raid 1 for important data and Raid 0 for scratch disk and non-important data. I love Intel's Matrix Raid because it is the only way of getting 2 Raid arrays on 1 set of drives. I also have a 3ware hardware Raid controller with 4-500GB Seagate 7200.11 drives in Raid 5 for photo & video storage. It averages 240MB/s reads and 180MB/s writes while the Raid 10(Raptors) averages 160MB/s read & writes and the Raid 0 averages 250MB/s reads & writes. When I first got the 7200.11s, I had tested them in Raid 10 with speeds just above the Raptors in Raid 10. I have tested all sorts of different configurations from single Raptors with everything split among them to Raptors on my 3ware Raid controller alongside 4-250GB 7200.10s with 4-74GB Raptors in Raid 10 for OS/Apps to what I have now. My main goal was to be able to look thru images as quickly as possible in Bridge and also have as little lag in PS. I have ZERO patience when I'm working on my PC. Looking at photos located on a single drive is torture for me. Also, I couldn't imagine not having data protection, which saved me when a Raptor died a few weeks ago(1.5yrs old and surface temp never exceeded 38 C). I could have another die and not lose any data.

I totally agree that hard drives/storage setup is undervalued & often overlooked.

One more point: have you actually tried to restore an image with CS2/3/4 installed? I have tried with Norton and $800 Acronis Server software and after every restoration, I open PS or other Adobe app and it says to contact Adobe and won't let me use the program. I researched why this happens and it is because Adobe stores License info on a "secret" location on the hard drive that is not visible to the user. Also, Adobe has put in protections so you couldn't just restore an image to multiple computers.

Back to your laptop: the Seagate 7200.3 will make a big difference, especially if you have 5400rpm drives now. I upgraded a friends laptop from 5400rpm to a 7200.2 as a favor for letting me borrow it and also since I was borrowing it, I wanted better performance. Everything was a lot faster and more responsive.

 

[rob25]

Hi again Tiger, you lost your stripes & let your hair grow long(avatar.), too much AC/DC : laugh;

It is great to have stumbled across someone with a lot of knowledge of pc hardware aplied to photography.


I think we are repeating a lot on subjects from The other post.. You seem to know a lot about raiding, maybe you could open your own post on this & explain it, then link to it when refering to it, it will probably save you a lot of writing & it would sure be usefull to people like me who dont understand well the different raid concepts. You realy got me going on the raid bussines, so let me know if you make that post, if not i would apreciate some links to usefull info on creating raid 0/1 or 10 .

As for answers to drive images, link back to the other post, makes more sense.

I love Intel's Matrix Raid because it is the only way of getting 2 Raid arrays on 1 set of drives.

:Q You mean you can set up raid 0/1 on only two drives?????
Im telling you, we realy need a dedicated post on this subject.

Any idea how partitioning would work on raided drives, in respect to what part of the disk/s it would store each partition?
Can you defragment raided drives?

Back to your laptop: the Seagate 7200.3 will make a big difference, especially if you have 5400rpm drives now

The other drive is a wd 3200bevt & although it is only 5400 I have seen it in benchmarks & it beats a lot of 7200s & it is not that far of the better 7200s to change it. So if i were to consider the raid proposal on my laptop I would be looking at a second 3200bevt, my economy is not that great right now.

I totally agree that hard drives/storage setup is undervalued & often overlooked.

Yeah, it hurts when I read threads like people with an e8400, 3gb of ram & a 1Tb drive asking for advice for a photoshop rig & all I see is Buy,buy,buy, i7, 4x velociraptors, etc.etc. someone must be selling something dodgy around there to be flaunting so much $ :laugh:

Its like going to the mechanic with a fast car that does not grip well on corners & asking for a solution & instead of tuning it up & changing to good perfomance tires & suspension, say Buy a Lamurgini.

From what ive read an e8400 perfoms bettter then some quads with photoshop, you just need too boost up the ram, a good hardrive setup, a 64x OS and a 64x PS4 set up properly.

Well, thats my 2 cents for free😀

 

[wwswimming]

Originally posted by: rob25I have just Changed My laptop to vista 64 , it took me over 3 days, I had to learn all about mbr & crap that I really never wanted to know, trying to get the ah heck to boot.
I now have it all optimized, Vista 64, cs4, autopano pro & photomatix, I notice a hell of a difference in photoshop cs4, The brush tip no longer lags & autopano seems faster too.

The only real lag I find is in bridge cs4, when you press space bar to see the full screen image it is ok but then when you click to zoom in it takes about 3-7 sec to load.

I hope this info might have helped someone & if you have anything to add or correct please be my guest .😉

i'm taking a Photoshop class after using it for about 12 years & we're using CS4 in the class.

i have it installed on a dual boot laptop with 4 GB RAM & Vista 64 Home & Vista 32 Ultimate. it's a Core2Duo 2 GHz.

it's really hard for me to tell which is faster, between Vista 64 & Vista 32. subjectively, Vista 32 is faster, but that's without getting out a stopwatch and doing some operation on a larger image file. most of the image files we use for homework are about 3000 pixels x 2000 pixels.

 

[rob25]

I know that vista home has more limited resousces for eg. ram use, maybe that is why. I am comparing two home premium versions. As I say, when I had the 32 x & cs4 I had a lot of lag on my brushtip preview, it would move around about 1/2 a second slower, sometimes it would just take of miles above the screen for some reason or all of a sudden a huge stroke across the screen 🙂frown: I was not consuming anthing , OK !!!) .With the crop tool too, it would do very stange things. Now with the 64x I do not have that problem.