Graphic Designers: Does Your W7 Suck as Much as Mine?

It's actually not photoshop itself lagging that's the issue, it's switching between different programs while having PS running.

Turning off effects in the appearance/performance section is helping out alot too. Doing a bunch of random non scientific testing with settings today.

copernicus said:

So I'm using W7 on and off for production work. Primarily PS/AI/Corel/ and a few other ram hungry programs.

I have a Core i7 920, 3 gigs of tri channel ram, running two scratch disks in PS(for sata 3 gigs)

This thing slows to a crawl switching between programs. I'm dealing with more of less heaving files 30-600 meg photoshop files. My RIP is running the bg eating up 400-600 gigs of ram during it's processes.

At first I though it was the 64 bit PS that was acting funny, but 32 bit does the same. This is rather frustrating when I'm trying to say head on over to Opera to grab something, cause I have to wait for windows to change focus for 5-10 seconds. For instance right now I have PS/AI/Opera/MSN/foobar open, and the spinning wheel just showed up when I was switching tabs on Opera.

(Get more ram Dummy!)

Yes that would help, but the issue is, this same computer absolutely FLIES on my XP install doing all of the same things.

Does this have to do with how seven manages superfetch and all that? Cause I can free up my ram on XP by minimizing any program, which doesn't happen on 7.

So any heavy graphic users using w7 for production? I get so frustrated with the sluggishness I usually end up going back to XP to finish my graphic work.

Actually, Windows 7 is more fast then XP, if you have'nt disable the prefetch fuction. The prefecth function studies you usage behaviour, and loads the files of your program, which you specifically start at a time. Say, you, on a daily basis, use Photoshop at 9 A.M. Then prefetch will automatically load the files necessary to run PS at about 9 A.M. It does makes things faster, and in the same time shoots up Ram Usage.
I also suspect that there might be malware infection on your rig. Try Avg Free and scan your whole rig. ALSO, on 3 gigs of Ram, 64 bit PS is unnecessary, it will decline performance, not increase it. Try to check that you installed compatible versions of PS Addons too. Let me know if it helps.

I am running w7 x64 on 1 gb of ram, and it switches windows fine, if it does get a little slow, then i put 7 into classic theme, it gets rid of all of the aero effects, so it helps things run a bit faster :)