new computer or new video card needed?

On 2007-05-13 05:59:59 +0200, louise said:

I want to emphasize that everything works, but it is slow and I am
constantly waiting for large files to open...

Just shoot JPEG and things will arrange themselves.
--
F. Misto

louise wrote:
I've just purchased my first DSLR (Nikon D40X) and I'm shooting in RAW.
I am using Capture NX to do intial adjustments to the raw image and then
saving it as a tiff. I then open the tiff in CS3 and continue editing.

So, Capture NX, CS3, Outlook and Firefox are usually open. And my
computer is moving between Capture NX and CS3 very very slowly, pictures
are being drawn slowly and changes are previewed....slowly. It is only
slightly better if I close Outlook and Firefox - it is still slow enough
to be frustrating for any quantity of work.

I want to emphasize that everything works, but it is slow and I am
constantly waiting for large files to open and to adjust to changes. I
find the transition from Capture NX to opening the tiff in CS3 to be
extremely slow.

I don't know whether I really need a new computer, or whether it is
simply that my graphics card isn't up to the tasks I am now presenting
to it. Here are the specs:

P4, 3.2 with 2 gig of ram and an Asus Motherboard. Large seagate hard
drive with plenty of space.

The video card is a Saphire Radeon 9600 Pro Atlantic with 128 meg of
memory in the AGP 8x slot of an Asus P4C800E Deluxe motherboard.

Do I need a new computer with a much faster processor, or is the the
video card the main bottleneck? If the video card is the bottleneck, do
I get another AGP 8X with 256 meg of ram or do I get a regular PCI card
and not use the AGP slot at all? I do have an open PCI slot. What
specs should I look for in a card?

I am hoping that a new video card will take care of the slowness for
another year when I will feel more ready to buy a new computer. But if
not....then it will have to be sooner.

Thoughts, opinions, suggestions, etc., all very welcome.

TIA

Louise

Forget the video card, it's not the problem here. And a 3.2GHz P4 with
2 gigs of ram should be enough to handle most things. Does your hard
drive thrash a lot while you're working? If so, it's a sure sign that
the memory, all 2 gigs of it, is full enough that the paging, or swap,
file is being used to hold the overflow from memory.

CS3, like all PS software can be a memory hog. Go into Preferences and
find out how much memory it is reserving for files - usually about half
of available memory, so that can chew up about a gig for you, leaving
only a gig for all the other programs and data you have loaded. You can
reduce the amount reserved, depending on what you want PS3 to do. If
you only open one image file at a time in PS, then it's senseless to
reserve a gig just for that. I'd reduce it to maybe 250k up to 500k
max, freeing another half a gig or more.

The other main memory user could be Capture, if it holds all your images
in memory. I don't know that it does, and it shouldn't, but check for
that. A card full of raw images all converted into memory space can
soak up a lot of memory. A hundred images at 18 MB apiece is 1800 MB,
or 1.8 GB. If that's happening, write them to disk and close Capture
before proceeding.

You can use Task manager (Ctrl-Alt-delete) to see your memory usage.
Have that running minimized when you load up the various programs, and
you may get an idea of what is doing the memory hogging. Task manager
puts a small green bar graph at the bottom right of your screen. Dull
green is available memory, bright green is used memory. Shows you at a
glance how much memory is being used at any time.

Colin D.

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

Wayne J. Cosshall wrote:
It won't be your video card.

My first guess is your processor but how much free space is on the disk
used for swap for PS and is this disk also used for other things?

Cheers,

Wayne

Wayne J. Cosshall
Publisher, The Digital ImageMaker, http://www.dimagemaker.com/
Blog http://www.digitalimagemakerworld.com/
Publisher, Experimental Digital Photography
http://www.experimentaldigitalphotography.com
Personal art site http://www.cosshall.com/



louise wrote:
I've just purchased my first DSLR (Nikon D40X) and I'm shooting in
RAW. I am using Capture NX to do intial adjustments to the raw image
and then saving it as a tiff. I then open the tiff in CS3 and continue
editing.

So, Capture NX, CS3, Outlook and Firefox are usually open. And my
computer is moving between Capture NX and CS3 very very slowly,
pictures are being drawn slowly and changes are previewed....slowly.
It is only slightly better if I close Outlook and Firefox - it is
still slow enough to be frustrating for any quantity of work.

I want to emphasize that everything works, but it is slow and I am
constantly waiting for large files to open and to adjust to changes.
I find the transition from Capture NX to opening the tiff in CS3 to be
extremely slow.

I don't know whether I really need a new computer, or whether it is
simply that my graphics card isn't up to the tasks I am now presenting
to it. Here are the specs:

P4, 3.2 with 2 gig of ram and an Asus Motherboard. Large seagate hard
drive with plenty of space.

The video card is a Saphire Radeon 9600 Pro Atlantic with 128 meg of
memory in the AGP 8x slot of an Asus P4C800E Deluxe motherboard.

Do I need a new computer with a much faster processor, or is the the
video card the main bottleneck? If the video card is the bottleneck,
do I get another AGP 8X with 256 meg of ram or do I get a regular PCI
card and not use the AGP slot at all? I do have an open PCI slot.
What specs should I look for in a card?

I am hoping that a new video card will take care of the slowness for
another year when I will feel more ready to buy a new computer. But
if not....then it will have to be sooner.

Thoughts, opinions, suggestions, etc., all very welcome.

TIA

Louise


The disk is 300 gig and there 72 gig are used. Virtual
memory is set for 3069 for intial and max - in other words,
the same.

How do I set the amount of disk space used for CS3 swap?

TIA

Louise

babaloo wrote:
Your computer is adequate but you are asking alot of it.
Two gbs of RAM is adequate and, in fact, adding more in XP will dent your
pocketbook more than improve performance.
NX, PS and CS3 hog both memory (RAM, swap file/scratch disk) and system
resources (the bits any OS uses to keep track of what it is doing, which are
finite). 10mp images quickly swell to 50mbs or more depending on how many
layers and filters you are using.
You are on the right track about shutting down un-necessary background
programs and processes: that is the main software configuration change you
can make that will yield a tangible improvement. Virus programs and
firewalls should not be a problem but might be.
If you do not have at least two physically separate hard drives plugged into
the motherboard then get a second and configure properly for use as a
Windows Swap/photoshop scratch file. There are many source of info about
this, including Adobe.
If you want to upgrade the tasks you are trying to do call out for a dual
core processor. Although each core may be slower than your PIV the OS can
assign programs to alternate processors and some CS3 processes, but not the
whole program, are multithreaded. Even with a dual core processor you still
need at least two hard drives. The same RAM limits apply: XP really cannot
use more than 2gbs effectively.
Whatever you do, do not get Vista (or any 64 bit OS). Although MS claims
32bit Vista can use 4gbs of RAM Vista is slower, buggy and there is a claim
out there that every time Vista gives you the screen blankout, which it does
every time you move a file or do some other innocuous chore, Vista unloads
the monitor calibration data. Easy to reinstall but what a pain.


I'd like to be able to keep this computer for another year.
I will look into a second hard drive since I only have one
SATA drive and I have the capacity for several.

Can you recommend a good site to explain about
swap/photoshop scratch drive?

Thanks.

Louise

Neil H. wrote:
"louise" wrote in message
...
I've just purchased my first DSLR (Nikon D40X) and I'm
shooting in RAW. I am using Capture NX to do intial
adjustments to the raw image and then saving it as a tiff.
I then open the tiff in CS3 and continue editing.

So, Capture NX, CS3, Outlook and Firefox are usually open.
And my computer is moving between Capture NX and CS3 very
very slowly, pictures are being drawn slowly and changes are
previewed....slowly. It is only slightly better if I close
Outlook and Firefox - it is still slow enough to be
frustrating for any quantity of work.

I want to emphasize that everything works, but it is slow
and I am constantly waiting for large files to open and to
adjust to changes. I find the transition from Capture NX to
opening the tiff in CS3 to be extremely slow.

I don't know whether I really need a new computer, or
whether it is simply that my graphics card isn't up to the
tasks I am now presenting to it. Here are the specs:

P4, 3.2 with 2 gig of ram and an Asus Motherboard. Large
seagate hard drive with plenty of space.

The video card is a Saphire Radeon 9600 Pro Atlantic with
128 meg of memory in the AGP 8x slot of an Asus P4C800E
Deluxe motherboard.

Do I need a new computer with a much faster processor, or is
the the video card the main bottleneck? If the video card
is the bottleneck, do I get another AGP 8X with 256 meg of
ram or do I get a regular PCI card and not use the AGP slot
at all? I do have an open PCI slot. What specs should I
look for in a card?

I am hoping that a new video card will take care of the
slowness for another year when I will feel more ready to buy
a new computer. But if not....then it will have to be sooner.

Thoughts, opinions, suggestions, etc., all very welcome.

TIA

Louise

I doubt that your graphics card is the problem. I think the Radeon 9600 Pro
is a very good card for what you're doing. And your computer specs sound as
though you have plenty of processing power and memory.

Forget about a graohics card for your PCI slot. Most if not all new
computers use PCI Express for the graphics card, but PCI Express is entirely
different from the standard PCI slots that you have, which are significantly
slower than AGP. Since you have AGP, you surely do not have PCI Express. The
real-world advantage of PCI Express 16x over AGP 8x is trivial anyway.

My guess is that the slowness you're experiencing is due mostly to using
those 10Mp RAW files. I'm assuming that you had no similar problem with
digital photos before you got the D40x -- is that correct? But I don't have
a 10Mp SLR, rarely if ever shoot RAW, use the older Nikon Capture 4 and
don't use any flavor of Photoshop, so I can't really put myself in your
situation.

Do you have any such problems when shooting JPEG?

Neil


You're correct that when shooting jpg and going directly
into Photoshop, even CS3, there is minimal slowdown. But
what I have been doing is starting with Capture NX for RAW
and then using Capture to "open in" (file/open in) CS3 and
then I'm saving as a tif and continuing my editing is
photoshop.

At this point, Capture NX and CS3 are both open - I'm
realizing from reading everyone's answers that this may be
asking too much of my system and that it would be worth
closing Capture and reopening it when I'm ready to work on
the next picture.

Louise

On Sat, 12 May 2007 23:59:59 -0400, louise
wrote:

I've just purchased my first DSLR (Nikon D40X) and I'm
shooting in RAW. I am using Capture NX to do intial
adjustments to the raw image and then saving it as a tiff.
I then open the tiff in CS3 and continue editing.

I've been following this thread and have a question and a couple of
comments.

First, Why use capture? I do all my conversions in Photoshop.
Running both programs at once should really slow a single core
processor down, particularly when both use a lot of CPU cycles/power


So, Capture NX, CS3, Outlook and Firefox are usually open.
And my computer is moving between Capture NX and CS3 very
very slowly, pictures are being drawn slowly and changes are
previewed....slowly. It is only slightly better if I close
Outlook and Firefox - it is still slow enough to be
frustrating for any quantity of work.

This sounds like page file swapping. That means you are using a lot of
resources you don't need to be using. Even using a Nikon LS5000ED
scanner and film strips of 5 or 6 negatives with Vuescan feeding
Photoshop I see no slow down in VueScan, (or Nikon Scan if I use that
one), PhotoShop, and the transfer between them. Prior to going from
one Gig to two gigs of RAM I did. With the input from my D70 I simply
copy or move the files to a folder on the hard drive (not the same one
as PhotoShop or VueScan) and then run either Photoshop or Paint Shop
Pro XI. Photoshop can do the conversion from a NEF or TIF in 3 to 5
seconds including loading the file when set up as a macro.


I want to emphasize that everything works, but it is slow
and I am constantly waiting for large files to open and to
adjust to changes. I find the transition from Capture NX to
opening the tiff in CS3 to be extremely slow.

Why not just open the file in CS3?


I don't know whether I really need a new computer, or
whether it is simply that my graphics card isn't up to the
tasks I am now presenting to it. Here are the specs:

The graphics card should have nothing to do with it, particularly with
static images. It is only concerned with rendering the one, static
image so you should have plenty of video memory as well as speed.


P4, 3.2 with 2 gig of ram and an Asus Motherboard. Large
seagate hard drive with plenty of space.

Only one parallel hard drive might be one of the bottle necks even if
it is an ATA 133. That's about 1 Gbs transfer rate which your FSB can
easily handle even if it is about a third of the new SATA drives.
(It's fast enough to handle them too) You really need your swap file
on a different hard drive from the app.


The video card is a Saphire Radeon 9600 Pro Atlantic with
128 meg of memory in the AGP 8x slot of an Asus P4C800E
Deluxe motherboard.


This mother board has a front side buss of 800 MHz and DDR-400 memory
which with 2 Gigs should be far more than sufficient. The machine
beside this one is running an Athlon 3.4 Gig XP Plus with a true core
speed of only 1.8 Gig and it does just fine IF I don't run too many
apps at the same time. Your CPU is almost twice that fast. This one
is a dual core FX62 running over 3 Gig core speed with SATA drives and
16 meg cache capable of close to 3 Gbs transfer rates and I do notice
it being quite a bit faster when loading NEFs, converting them to
TIFFs, resizing, and then saving. Photoshop uses both cores at the
same time in this case. I think the D40 uses a different format than
NEF, but I'd not expect that to be a problem.

Do I need a new computer with a much faster processor, or is
the the video card the main bottleneck? If the video card

Basically my opinion is No...to all of the above.

is the bottleneck, do I get another AGP 8X with 256 meg of
ram or do I get a regular PCI card and not use the AGP slot
at all? I do have an open PCI slot. What specs should I
look for in a card?

I am hoping that a new video card will take care of the
slowness for another year when I will feel more ready to buy
a new computer. But if not....then it will have to be sooner.

Thoughts, opinions, suggestions, etc., all very welcome.

"My guess" is you may have a configuration problem coupled with too
many unneeded apps running in the background and possibly even in the
foreground. You only need to step across the boundary to page file
swapping the tiniest bit and things will appear to be stuck in
molasses.

One of the things I did get rid of was Norton's "auto protect" which
I've found to be a real resource hog. Another is built in the error
reporting. I've forgotten the name of the windows app, but that thing
starts an error report every time it thinks an app isn't finishing up
when it should and that slows things even more.

Another thing I'd try is to run clean up.
http://www.stevengould.org/software/cleanup/
It's free and effective and they do ask for donations if you like it.
(Disclaimer, I do not know them and have no association with the
product other than liking it), HOWEVER make sure you have all of your
passwords listed so IF they should disappear you can get back where
you were. Also it will clean cookies up and if you use cookies to
remember logins you may have to log in again. Follow the directions
carefully. The first time I ran it on this machine it freed up over 5
Gigs of disk space and I'd only been using the machine about a month.

I've had no problems with it, but they do warn all prospective users
about using programs to clean up computers.

If you've not cleaned out your temp files and other stuff that
accumulates it might very well make up a considerable portion of the
material on your hard drive.


Good Luck,



TIA

Louise

On 13 May 2007 10:43:13 -0700, RichA wrote:

Capture NX and CS are both intensive users of process and memory.
Ever listen to the hard drive when NX is used? It goes mad. I think
they should come out with programs stripped down to the photographic
essentials and engineered for speed.

MS has such an app included with Windows: Paint.

--
THIS IS A SIG LINE; NOT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY!

Paris Hilton sought Wednesday to avoid her
upcoming stay in the Los Angeles County Jail.
She has inspired forty groups around the country
to stage rallies demanding a pardon. Nobody's
sorrier than Paris Hilton that Bill Clinton
isn't president anymore.

"Bill Funk" wrote in message
...
On 13 May 2007 10:43:13 -0700, RichA wrote:

Capture NX and CS are both intensive users of process and memory.
Ever listen to the hard drive when NX is used? It goes mad. I think
they should come out with programs stripped down to the photographic
essentials and engineered for speed.

MS has such an app included with Windows: Paint.

guffaw!


--
THIS IS A SIG LINE; NOT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY!

Paris Hilton sought Wednesday to avoid her
upcoming stay in the Los Angeles County Jail.
She has inspired forty groups around the country
to stage rallies demanding a pardon. Nobody's
sorrier than Paris Hilton that Bill Clinton
isn't president anymore.

Are you making these up yourself, or getting them somewhere?

That one's so good I think I'll swipe it. But I do enjoy most of yours
anyway.

Neil

Roger (K8RI) wrote:
On Sat, 12 May 2007 23:59:59 -0400, louise
wrote:

I've just purchased my first DSLR (Nikon D40X) and I'm
shooting in RAW. I am using Capture NX to do intial
adjustments to the raw image and then saving it as a tiff.
I then open the tiff in CS3 and continue editing.

I've been following this thread and have a question and a couple of
comments.

First, Why use capture? I do all my conversions in Photoshop.
Running both programs at once should really slow a single core
processor down, particularly when both use a lot of CPU cycles/power

So, Capture NX, CS3, Outlook and Firefox are usually open.
And my computer is moving between Capture NX and CS3 very
very slowly, pictures are being drawn slowly and changes are
previewed....slowly. It is only slightly better if I close
Outlook and Firefox - it is still slow enough to be
frustrating for any quantity of work.

This sounds like page file swapping. That means you are using a lot of
resources you don't need to be using. Even using a Nikon LS5000ED
scanner and film strips of 5 or 6 negatives with Vuescan feeding
Photoshop I see no slow down in VueScan, (or Nikon Scan if I use that
one), PhotoShop, and the transfer between them. Prior to going from
one Gig to two gigs of RAM I did. With the input from my D70 I simply
copy or move the files to a folder on the hard drive (not the same one
as PhotoShop or VueScan) and then run either Photoshop or Paint Shop
Pro XI. Photoshop can do the conversion from a NEF or TIF in 3 to 5
seconds including loading the file when set up as a macro.

I want to emphasize that everything works, but it is slow
and I am constantly waiting for large files to open and to
adjust to changes. I find the transition from Capture NX to
opening the tiff in CS3 to be extremely slow.

Why not just open the file in CS3?

I don't know whether I really need a new computer, or
whether it is simply that my graphics card isn't up to the
tasks I am now presenting to it. Here are the specs:

The graphics card should have nothing to do with it, particularly with
static images. It is only concerned with rendering the one, static
image so you should have plenty of video memory as well as speed.

P4, 3.2 with 2 gig of ram and an Asus Motherboard. Large
seagate hard drive with plenty of space.

Only one parallel hard drive might be one of the bottle necks even if
it is an ATA 133. That's about 1 Gbs transfer rate which your FSB can
easily handle even if it is about a third of the new SATA drives.
(It's fast enough to handle them too) You really need your swap file
on a different hard drive from the app.

The video card is a Saphire Radeon 9600 Pro Atlantic with
128 meg of memory in the AGP 8x slot of an Asus P4C800E
Deluxe motherboard.


This mother board has a front side buss of 800 MHz and DDR-400 memory
which with 2 Gigs should be far more than sufficient. The machine
beside this one is running an Athlon 3.4 Gig XP Plus with a true core
speed of only 1.8 Gig and it does just fine IF I don't run too many
apps at the same time. Your CPU is almost twice that fast. This one
is a dual core FX62 running over 3 Gig core speed with SATA drives and
16 meg cache capable of close to 3 Gbs transfer rates and I do notice
it being quite a bit faster when loading NEFs, converting them to
TIFFs, resizing, and then saving. Photoshop uses both cores at the
same time in this case. I think the D40 uses a different format than
NEF, but I'd not expect that to be a problem.

Do I need a new computer with a much faster processor, or is
the the video card the main bottleneck? If the video card

Basically my opinion is No...to all of the above.

is the bottleneck, do I get another AGP 8X with 256 meg of
ram or do I get a regular PCI card and not use the AGP slot
at all? I do have an open PCI slot. What specs should I
look for in a card?

I am hoping that a new video card will take care of the
slowness for another year when I will feel more ready to buy
a new computer. But if not....then it will have to be sooner.

Thoughts, opinions, suggestions, etc., all very welcome.

"My guess" is you may have a configuration problem coupled with too
many unneeded apps running in the background and possibly even in the
foreground. You only need to step across the boundary to page file
swapping the tiniest bit and things will appear to be stuck in
molasses.

One of the things I did get rid of was Norton's "auto protect" which
I've found to be a real resource hog. Another is built in the error
reporting. I've forgotten the name of the windows app, but that thing
starts an error report every time it thinks an app isn't finishing up
when it should and that slows things even more.

Another thing I'd try is to run clean up.
http://www.stevengould.org/software/cleanup/
It's free and effective and they do ask for donations if you like it.
(Disclaimer, I do not know them and have no association with the
product other than liking it), HOWEVER make sure you have all of your
passwords listed so IF they should disappear you can get back where
you were. Also it will clean cookies up and if you use cookies to
remember logins you may have to log in again. Follow the directions
carefully. The first time I ran it on this machine it freed up over 5
Gigs of disk space and I'd only been using the machine about a month.

I've had no problems with it, but they do warn all prospective users
about using programs to clean up computers.

If you've not cleaned out your temp files and other stuff that
accumulates it might very well make up a considerable portion of the
material on your hard drive.


Good Luck,


TIA

Louise

Thanks for your thoughts. I don't use cleanup, but I do use
CCleaner (crap cleaner) - same general principle with a lot
of flexibility and choices.

I'm using Capture NX because CS3 does (not yet) support the
D40X although they do support the D40. Adobe and Nikon
agree that the NEF files are slightly different on the two
cameras. So at this point, Capture NX is a necessity. But
I have been starting to close it after making basic
adjustments and then moving the tif to CS3.

I haven't run CCleaner in a while and will do so tonight. I
don't run anything Norton except for using Ghost for monthly
backups - it is not running except when I turn it on. Daily
backups are done with Retrospect. I try to keep background
apps to a minimum but it is a constant battle. I do have
automatic reporting turned off. I'm using a very low
resource hog AV (NOD32) but maybe not such a low resource
hog, SuperAntiSpyware. I could probably turn that off also
when I'm doing photos.

However, I'd like to understand the use of a second drive
for the swap file. I can certainly pick up a second drive
on Newegg and install it. I gather I would then format it.
Then what? Do I just use it as a swap drive for CS3? Do
I partition it? How large should it be?

I'm wondering whether it might be a good idea to get a large
second drive, partition it, and store all my raw files on
one partition while using the other partition for a swap
file. Would that be reasonable? I'm thinking of it because
now that I'm shooting in raw, I'm beginning to have a large
quantity of large files which I would like to keep
unprocessed for possible use in the future.

I'd greatly appreciate some clarification about how to set
up the swap file and whether I could partition it and save
my raw files on the other partition. How large should the
swap file be?

I'm off to run CCleaner :-)

Thanks again for your thoughts and suggestions.

Louise

On May 14, 11:06 pm, louise wrote:
Roger (K8RI) wrote:
On Sat, 12 May 2007 23:59:59 -0400, louise
wrote:

I've just purchased my first DSLR (Nikon D40X) and I'm
shooting in RAW. I am using Capture NX to do intial
adjustments to the raw image and then saving it as a tiff.
I then open the tiff in CS3 and continue editing.

I've been following this thread and have a question and a couple of
comments.

First, Why use capture? I do all my conversions in Photoshop.
Running both programs at once should really slow a single core
processor down, particularly when both use a lot of CPU cycles/power

So, Capture NX, CS3, Outlook and Firefox are usually open.
And my computer is moving between Capture NX and CS3 very
very slowly, pictures are being drawn slowly and changes are
previewed....slowly. It is only slightly better if I close
Outlook and Firefox - it is still slow enough to be
frustrating for any quantity of work.

This sounds like page file swapping. That means you are using a lot of
resources you don't need to be using. Even using a Nikon LS5000ED
scanner and film strips of 5 or 6 negatives with Vuescan feeding
Photoshop I see no slow down in VueScan, (or Nikon Scan if I use that
one), PhotoShop, and the transfer between them. Prior to going from
one Gig to two gigs of RAM I did. With the input from my D70 I simply
copy or move the files to a folder on the hard drive (not the same one
as PhotoShop or VueScan) and then run either Photoshop or Paint Shop
Pro XI. Photoshop can do the conversion from a NEF or TIF in 3 to 5
seconds including loading the file when set up as a macro.

I want to emphasize that everything works, but it is slow
and I am constantly waiting for large files to open and to
adjust to changes. I find the transition from Capture NX to
opening the tiff in CS3 to be extremely slow.

Why not just open the file in CS3?

I don't know whether I really need a new computer, or
whether it is simply that my graphics card isn't up to the
tasks I am now presenting to it. Here are the specs:

The graphics card should have nothing to do with it, particularly with
static images. It is only concerned with rendering the one, static
image so you should have plenty of video memory as well as speed.

P4, 3.2 with 2 gig of ram and an Asus Motherboard. Large
seagate hard drive with plenty of space.

Only one parallel hard drive might be one of the bottle necks even if
it is an ATA 133. That's about 1 Gbs transfer rate which your FSB can
easily handle even if it is about a third of the new SATA drives.
(It's fast enough to handle them too) You really need your swap file
on a different hard drive from the app.

The video card is a Saphire Radeon 9600 Pro Atlantic with
128 meg of memory in the AGP 8x slot of an Asus P4C800E
Deluxe motherboard.

This mother board has a front side buss of 800 MHz and DDR-400 memory
which with 2 Gigs should be far more than sufficient. The machine
beside this one is running an Athlon 3.4 Gig XP Plus with a true core
speed of only 1.8 Gig and it does just fine IF I don't run too many
apps at the same time. Your CPU is almost twice that fast. This one
is a dual core FX62 running over 3 Gig core speed with SATA drives and
16 meg cache capable of close to 3 Gbs transfer rates and I do notice
it being quite a bit faster when loading NEFs, converting them to
TIFFs, resizing, and then saving. Photoshop uses both cores at the
same time in this case. I think the D40 uses a different format than
NEF, but I'd not expect that to be a problem.

Do I need a new computer with a much faster processor, or is
the the video card the main bottleneck? If the video card

Basically my opinion is No...to all of the above.

is the bottleneck, do I get another AGP 8X with 256 meg of
ram or do I get a regular PCI card and not use the AGP slot
at all? I do have an open PCI slot. What specs should I
look for in a card?

I am hoping that a new video card will take care of the
slowness for another year when I will feel more ready to buy
a new computer. But if not....then it will have to be sooner.

Thoughts, opinions, suggestions, etc., all very welcome.

"My guess" is you may have a configuration problem coupled with too
many unneeded apps running in the background and possibly even in the
foreground. You only need to step across the boundary to page file
swapping the tiniest bit and things will appear to be stuck in
molasses.

One of the things I did get rid of was Norton's "auto protect" which
I've found to be a real resource hog. Another is built in the error
reporting. I've forgotten the name of the windows app, but that thing
starts an error report every time it thinks an app isn't finishing up
when it should and that slows things even more.

Another thing I'd try is to run clean up.
http://www.stevengould.org/software/cleanup/
It's free and effective and they do ask for donations if you like it.
(Disclaimer, I do not know them and have no association with the
product other than liking it), HOWEVER make sure you have all of your
passwords listed so IF they should disappear you can get back where
you were. Also it will clean cookies up and if you use cookies to
remember logins you may have to log in again. Follow the directions
carefully. The first time I ran it on this machine it freed up over 5
Gigs of disk space and I'd only been using the machine about a month.

I've had no problems with it, but they do warn all prospective users
about using programs to clean up computers.

If you've not cleaned out your temp files and other stuff that
accumulates it might very well make up a considerable portion of the
material on your hard drive.

Good Luck,

TIA

Louise

Thanks for your thoughts. I don't use cleanup, but I do use
CCleaner (crap cleaner) - same general principle with a lot
of flexibility and choices.

I'm using Capture NX because CS3 does (not yet) support the
D40X although they do support the D40. Adobe and Nikon
agree that the NEF files are slightly different on the two
cameras. So at this point, Capture NX is a necessity. But
I have been starting to close it after making basic
adjustments and then moving the tif to CS3.

I haven't run CCleaner in a while and will do so tonight. I
don't run anything Norton except for using Ghost for monthly
backups - it is not running except when I turn it on. Daily
backups are done with Retrospect. I try to keep background
apps to a minimum but it is a constant battle. I do have
automatic reporting turned off. I'm using a very low
resource hog AV (NOD32) but maybe not such a low resource
hog, SuperAntiSpyware. I could probably turn that off also
when I'm doing photos.

However, I'd like to understand the use of a second drive
for the swap file. I can certainly pick up a second drive
on Newegg and install it. I gather I would then format it.
Then what? Do I just use it as a swap drive for CS3? Do
I partition it? How large should it be?

I'm wondering whether it might be a good idea to get a large
second drive, partition it, and store all my raw files on
one partition while using the other partition for a swap
file. Would that be reasonable? I'm thinking of it because
now that I'm shooting in raw, I'm beginning to have a large
quantity of large files which I would like to keep
unprocessed for possible use in the future.

I'd greatly appreciate some clarification about how to set
up the swap file and whether I could partition it and save
my raw files on the other partition. How large should the
swap file be?

I'm off to run CCleaner :-)

Thanks again for your thoughts and suggestions.

Louise


louise,
The second hard drive is a good idea, run the PSCS scratch disk their,
if you partion it 10gb for PSCS and the rest for storage only, no
programs. I use a 2.7ghz Athlon 2 gb and a ATI Radeon card. I use
Capture One, yes with RAW files you don't have seemless workings, I
don't think you would unless you get the fastest system available. You
are using a 3.2 Ghz system to double the speed you need, what, 6.4
Ghz, a rough calculation, but I don't think a new system would help a
lot. That is unless you really want one. Just pushing around 30-60mp
tiffs takes a little time.
I havve been seroiusly scanning older 2 1/4 and 4x5 work I've done.
Color 4x5 at 2000ppi runs a 400mb 16bit file.

Tom