Improving Adobe CS4 Speed

If you are pulling your hair out, here are a few tips that may come in handy when trying to improve the speed of your Adobe CS4 trials/demos or full versions (for PC users)

1. The most obvious – upgrade your damn system.
If you expect anything to run adequately on your Dualcore with 2 gigs of ram and some crappy hdd, then you are dreaming, sure the average user has this for their home system, but if you are a pro or semi pro designer and you are working with this, quit complaining and upgrade. Get a Quadcore CPU, atleast 4Gigs of good quality ram, a couple of 10K or 15K RPM hdds, a decent video card, (an Nvidia Quadro or ATI FireGL for instance), a good motherboard (ie genuine Intel) and then throw on Vista 64bit.

2. Update your drivers.
Sure if it aint broke dont fix it is a great adage, but nerds say if it aint broke, tweak it, so I would check all your hardware and make sure you have the latest drivers for each component and if you don’t, download them from their respective websites or other places like guru3d.com etc.

3. Update your windows from windows updates.
This is relatively easy and can help improve a few bugs you may be experiencing.

4. Disable Font Preview.
Might not be the most productive option, but this can have an effect on CS4 speed.

5. Change the Hand Tool.
You can put this on Faster updates and see if you notice a change.

6. Untick open Documents as Tabs.
For quite a few people this has made a massive improvement in speed.

7. Don’t leave your software open for hours if you aren’t using it.
Windows is awful at its memory management, and its better to close your programs down and open them up again when you need to.

8. Disable Aero on Vista.
You can turn this off and see it may improve your speed, some people have noticed turning it on made CS4 run better, but you can try and see what works for you.

9. For Photoshop CS4.
A few people have noticed a massive reduction in Lag in photoshop after they have unticked the enable openGL, for some with good video cards, the opposite is true, so have a fiddle and see what suits you. Unticking Animated Zoom and Enable Flick Panning can also help with screen lag.

10. Wait for Adobe updates.
They are coming, they have to.

11. Format.
Nothing is good as a clean reinstall, you should do it fairly often for maximum performance.

12. OR, shuttup and get a mac.
They don’t only look good, sometimes they actually work good too.

Tags: adobe cs4, Cs4, drivers, illustrator, indesign, lag, laggy, photoshop, refresh, slow, unbearable, vista