Digital BW, The Print

owenpevans wrote:

>Keith,
>I'll have to agree with Paul on this one that the limitation is within
>Windows.
>  
>
He's right..

>This is my experience thusfar. Would you be able to tell us more about the
>symptoms which you are encountering?
>  
>

Well, it's not a problem YET...

It's more preparation for an upgrade of my system.. I currently have 2gB 
of RAM and dual CPUs...

I'm looking at a new moboard with support for either dual Opterons or 
dual Xeon P4s..  One factor to consider is how much memory I can address 
in the OS and with PShop in particular.. (It's my workhouse application).

However..  I've been playing with some things and found a utility called 
RAMDiskXP.  Up until today, the RAM drive support for XP I had seen... 
Well it was not the greatest..

But, by using this utility and creating a 513 mB ram disk, and setting 
that as the first scratch drive I am seeing a significant performance 
increase in a bunch of operations (BTW: Adobe used to recommend RAM 
scratch disks back in its early incarnations)... That's on layered 
imagery up to 13x19...  If I was into benchmarking this kinda stuff I'd 
run the scratch disk at various sizes and compare how PhotoShop runs 
using the remaining memory in each configuration.. 

My swap file sizes don't generally get beyond half a gB, so I've set up 
two new boot options.. One boots into XP Pro with 1535mB set for Win XP, 
the second does the same but with only 1024 mB set for Windows.. I'm 
generally booting into the first version, but if I am working on a 
really large 16bit image with lots of layers, and intend to do major 
filtering, etc., I can go to the latter option.  Alternatively, if I 
don't expect to be using PhotoShop at all, I can still boot into XP and 
give it access to all the memory, or even boot into Win 98 (the command 
line version is still good for working on system issues - I don't like 
the XP command line interface, it's extremely limiting)

In case anyone wants to try the RAMDisk utility I'm testing, it's at:

http://www.cenatek.com/

and has a 30 day trial period
 

 
Keith Krebs

"Just some guy," and caretaker of the Multiverse's largest EPSON printer 
User Community (highly recommended by Vogon Poets and MegaDodo 
Publications), at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EPSON_Printers/
 
"For the rest of you out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together 
guys"