1gb + Virtual Memory?

[atct86]

Hi, I have 1gb of memory on my T40.

I have started to scan very high (80mb+) TIFF images of old family photos, and edit them in PhotoShop CS.

I am condsidering replacing one of my 512 sticks with a 1gb stick. Would I notice a difference?

Also how schould I have my virtual memory configured. I have heard that you can extract more performance if it is disabled.

Thanks

[ricerocket]

While you're editing, open Task Manager and look at your commit charge under the performance tab, and your physical memory available.

[atct86]

wow, never looked at that.

Between 5mb and 11mb!

[davidspalding]

I use PS 5.5, with CS2 on order, but in the older versions, CTRL + K brings up preferences, and you can tell PS how much RAM to utilize on opening. I have 1.5 GB RAM, and tell it to use up 50%. (You can also tell it what to use as a scratch disk; handy if you have multiple partitions.) Your two 512 MB sticks ought to be more than fine.

As far as virtual memory, an old rule of thumb was 150% of RAM initial, 200% maximum. Everyone has his/her own opinion. XP has a neat feature, "Let Windows manage..." which takes the guesswork out of it. I'd go with that.

You can certainly try without virtual memory, older Photoshop versions would choke on that, but I'm told CS doesn't. I turned it off on my system, with little or no discernable effects, but prefer to use virtual memory for backward compatibility. Definitely, when editing big files, exit out of RAM hogs like Outlook, Word, instant messaging tools, etc.

[tripper]

You might be able to set up a RAM disk and use that as the scratch disk.

[smugiri]

There are several key points in performance improvement
1. RAM needs to be continuous: Adobe recommends restarting PhotoShop often to try and achieve this.
2. If the operating system has enough RAM to not have to swap pages out of RAM, then having virtual memory and the Photoshop scratch disk on the same drive will not decrease performance. One way to try and achieve this in a system like yours it to use a tool to prevent paging of the kernel ( try xteq xsetup which is a free download at http://www.x-setup.net/ )
You can also set the system to run optimized for the OS in
Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Performance -> Settings -> Advanced -> Memory Usage -> Adjust for best perfomance of "System Cache" for Windows XP.
This will work aganist you if you have less than say 768MB of RAM but will work wonders if you have 1GB like you mentioned.

Some links at Adobe to get you started:
-> Improving PhotoShop performance if you have more than 1 GB of RAM
-> PhotoShop memory allocation and usage