FFFUUUUUU–
A thunderstorm kept me from the computer awhile yesterday, so it was fitting to do a detour from the storyline, and once again tell my side of stuff.
<rant>Now, I draw everything in Corel Painter. I then move over to Photoshop at the end to do speech bubbles and text. Sounds simple enough, right? Sounds like it takes 10 minutes or so. IT TELL YOU NOW, IT TAKES FOREVER. Every little thing I do – such as just selecting the type tool (you know you’re fucked when it actually has to initialize), trying to copy and paste text, or create shape objects for bubbles – takes a fracture of infinity. And it’s so redundant, cause you just want to do it really fast, just get that text in there and update the site but NOOOOOOOO the goddamn text tool wants to INITIALIZE right up your ass.</rant>
Ok, so it doesn’t do that all the time. Actually, I couldn’t even reproduce the “Type Tool Initializing” to get a screen shot, for this strip. I had to photoshop it x) but… still, it’s slow!
August 10th, 2009 at 6:52 am
Interesting… Did you try to monitor amount of available RAM ? How much RAM do you have in the system ?
IMHO usually this sort of sluggishness is cause of computer not having enough memory to load all the necessary applications and swapping to disk like crazy – tell-tale sign is that the harddrive is reading/writing all the time.
August 10th, 2009 at 7:35 am
Why not use a free/open source equivalent to Photoshop. Paint.NET is amazingly lightweight (just used it for basic image edit) and GIMP (works better in Linux imho) rules. Also, a defragmentation wouldn’t hurt. You Windows users have THAT problem also
PP
August 10th, 2009 at 8:29 am
Sounds most likely Peter, this computer is around 5 years old and has 1 gb of RAM. And the harddrive I’ve assigned as a scratch disc for Photoshop is on repair. So I’m kinda used to sitting around waiting now.
Wise_One: Not to sound like a stubborn conservative but I NEED my Painter and Photoshop
I’ve tried GIMP on several occasions, and I don’t care for it too much. However, now I kinda feel like trying out Paint.NET… ^^
And yes, defragmentation… ugh. I’ve wanted to do that awhile now, but it’s just that the last time I did, I fucked up one of my harddrives, so now I’m reluctant to do it again. But I reckon I should.
(Oh, and I apologize that akismet treated your comment as spam, Wise_One. It’s not 100% accurate)
August 10th, 2009 at 8:36 am
Even on my super-slick Mac, this sometimes happens. Even more frustrating since it’s supposed to be built for this kind of thing…
August 10th, 2009 at 9:02 am
Supposedly, if you have a lot of fonts installed, it does that more often and longer. I don’t have an awful lot though.
August 10th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Try to lower the memory usage configuration of Photoshop.
Edit -> Preference -> Performance. Most times Photoshop tries to use as much as it can :p
Even with 2 GB of memory it does this tings
I now have very fast system, and even then Photoshop is slow in these things. I guess that you need at least 8 GB of memory and Quad Core 3 Ghz… on an 64 bit OS.
August 10th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Rasmus, the RAM is dirt cheap now, so try to stick as much as your computer will take ( up to 3 Gb if you are using 32 bit OS ) – it is really the cheapest and easiest upgrade one can do to a computer.
August 10th, 2009 at 9:59 am
@Sebastiaan: Wouldn’t lowering its memory usage make it even slower? :b
@Peter:
This motherboard can only utilize up to 1066 mb, if I’m not wrong :/(HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT etc.) I’ll invest in my own computer soon enough though.August 10th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Don’t make it to low
40% is good. But Photoshop uses 60 to 80 by default.
But I can’t remember if it was an speed or stability I had that was solved with this tweak.
@Peter: And also look at the speed, slow memory is killing.
And make sure the motherboard supports the speed.
I even heard that 32Bit supports 4GB maximum.
But that seems to variate between systems.
3GB may not always work, I bought 3GB of ram and the system hangs while at the BIOS state. 2GB no problem.
This is DDR3 memory so maybe that is different with DDR2 and SDRAM.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Nah, 3 Gb thing is a problem of Windows 32-bit OSes unable to address more than 3.14 GB of RAM. Even if you put 4 Gb in your system, it should boot normally, but the Windows will report only 3.14 Gb and not 4.
Sebastiaan, what you are talking about was a hardware incompatibility – I’d suggest either disabling dual channel or move the DIMMs in the slots. And if nothing helps – you can always open your motherboard manual and find what was wrong
August 10th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Funny when geeks flex the old muscles. Truth is PS is just amemory hog regardless of Windows or Mac. More memory is better of course. I wish you were in the US Rasmus as I’d hook you up with at least more memory. I come across a lot parts and older systems in my work and daily life. You should check out Paint.net, I use it for everything but it does not have as many functions as PS of course but it is useful and uses low resources. I think you’d like it but will go back to PS before long tho.
August 10th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I know the feeling, I cringe every time I accidentally hit the T key when mashing my keyboard for the right tool, and it freezes on me. I always know what it is. Grr.
August 10th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Clearly, Rasmus, the true answer to this problem is that Adobe is on to you and have sent an “update”: http://glitchtown.com/2009/07/marwho/
August 10th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
@Barry: hah, thanks, I appreciate the thought. Downloading paint.NET as we speak, gonna try it out.
@Xander: HAHA! I do that too and I hate it!
It’s so easy to tell that you’ve clicked the “wrong” button, cause it’s the only tool that freezes everything.
@Danny: And I bet YOU’RE the one who told them, right?! TRAITOR! D:
August 11th, 2009 at 9:29 am
@Peter: Already tried that
Didn’t work, but 2GB works good.
I only have 4 memory slots.
And my motherboard supports up to 8GB.
Its the ‘Asus Maximus Extreme’ with ‘GeiL 3 GB DDR3-1333 Tri-Kit’.
Changed various BIOS settings, did not work either. The booting process hangs at INIT USB.
Maybe someday with windows 7 I will get 4GB or so. For now it works.