Photoshop refresh issues

September 9, 2005 7:10 AM

Photoshop CS refresh issues with a widescreen monitor in WinXP. Am I the only one who sees this, and is there a fix (besides CS2)?

Upgraded from an older HP laptop to a new AMD64 with a widescreen running at 1600 x 1050 native resolution. Suddenly my copy of Photoshop CS refuses to work correctly - changes to the image on screen either don't show up or don't appear until after a very noticable lag (20 to 30 seconds at times). For example when I add text I see no change on screen, and dragging a layer often makes it disappear. Selection tools are useless as I can't see the area that I have selected. Occasionally zooming in or out on the image will force it to refresh, but often with text that doesn't help. This is driving me nuts.

I never saw this problem with my old laptop (smaller screen size, same brand video card, same copy of Photoshop.) I've looked around for a fix but so far have come up empty. Most search results are issues with screen refresh in OSX, not Windows. There is a photoshop extension that is supposed to help with refresh rate lags, I've tried it, it doesn't help me. I really do not want to upgrade to CS2 unless I know it's my only option (monetary issues aside, if I have to do it, I'd like to be sure that upgrading will actually help!)

As far as I know I have no issues with any other programs, just Photoshop (for example, ImageReady gives me no problems at all!). Video drivers are the latest available from my laptop manufacturer. Any help here at all would be appreciated.

posted by caution live frogs to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Try right clicking on the icon for Photoshop and disabling theme compatibility under the "compatibility" tab.

Should that not work, try the stuff at this link:
http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/318243.html

that you haven't already.
posted by fake at 7:43 AM on September 9, 2005

It's not a theme compatibility issue (but I tried that, didn't expect it would be as it ran fine on my old computer with themes enabled) and the page you linked isn't really helpful - more of an explanation of how to get CS to work on an older computer more efficiently. I've got a clean fresh install on a brand new system with a gig of RAM and a 64 bit processor here, if my old borked-up system with only 512 megs RAM didn't have the same display issues I doubt it's a memory allocation problem.

All of the other programs in the CS package work as expected - it's just Photoshop that's cocking up on me. Adobe's website is as helpful as I expected it to be - issue not mentioned or answers targeted at CS2 users.
posted by caution live frogs at 8:31 AM on September 9, 2005

I used to run a 600mhz laptop with 512Mb RAM. When I upgraded to a Dell Precision M70 with a 256Mb Quadro card, 2Gb ram, and a 7200RPM disk, Photoshop CS ran like a dog, when it had run fine on my machine before. The Precision M70 is a widescreen graphics workstation, something like your laptop.

I found the solution (allocating less RAM to PS) in the guide I linked above. It's not just for old machines, but if you find it unhelpful, I apologize. Personally, I had to limit the RAM available to PS to 768Mb to get it working like it used to. I know this seems counterintuitive.

I found that when Photoshop was freezing, it was just paging to the disk like crazy.

I posted the theme compatibility suggestion because it helped get Alias Maya working properly on my work machine, and PS CS on a coworkers machine.
posted by fake at 9:25 AM on September 9, 2005

Weird. As big a problem as this seems to be (I found lots of hits on this for Google but nothing that looked like it would help, so I turned here) it amazes me that there's no fix for it and Adobe doesn't mention it publicly. What really kills me is that Illustrator, InDesign, ImageReady and Acrobat don't show the same performance problems on this machine. I just don't get it. I would assume that all the programs would use the same rendering method or engine but apparently not.

I've yet to try allocating less disk RAM for Photoshop (forums I saw said this wasn't really an issue unless you have more than 2 gigs, so I didn't give it a shot yet...) It is pissing me off, makes it impossible to use the ridiculously expensive program package on my new machine. I didn't mean to sound pissy earlier, I was in a hurry (trying to finish editing some files for my class when I posted this question - and pulling my hair out at the same time due to this damn problem.)
posted by caution live frogs at 1:56 PM on September 9, 2005

Do you have the latest video card drivers?
posted by Khalad at 2:19 PM on September 9, 2005