Conflict between Word 2010 and Photoshop CS6

Recent problem: Photoshop is extremely slow while using the hand tool to move a picture. This happens ONLY when Word is open.

Another thing you might want to consider - CS6 has enabled extra graphical features to take advantage of some graphics cards (mostly nVidia cards). On a slower computer, this can cause conflicts. This seems to be especially true when using a graphics card that *can* handle enhancements, but the default graphics card list does not include your card. Note that the number of graphics cards that PS can use is much larger than the set of cards that can use GFX card enhancements in Premiere Pro.

For example, I will share my office computer's settings:
i5 with 16gb RAM. ATI AMD Radeon HD 6670 (yep, crappy card). I run off a 128GB SSD and a couple of WD HDD's.
I typically have around 1gb of ram taken up by around 100 tabs in google chrome, 300mb in around 10-15 tabs in firefox with one playing music through youtube playlists, 8 windows in file explorer and usually 4-5 excel documents and 2-3 Word documents open, as well ask skype and outlook. The only thing that causes stuttering in music playback (indicating load) is rendering video in premiere. I can zip around in 300MB multi-layered TIFF and PSD files to my heart's content. Temps typically never go beyond 55 degrees unless I am rendering.

But it wasn't always the case. I had that "hand-tool lag" issue too. It wasn't related to having Word open though.

Go into CS6 and go to your preferences (ctrl-K) and the Preferences section. Make sure your photoshop is leaving a bit of RAM for Office to use. I like to keep Photoshop between 60 and 70% of the RAM for the system. Maybe less if you have a computer with only 4GB RAM.

Next, check to see if it is set to use the graphic processor or not with the check box.

Try with it on and with it off (remember you'll need to close photoshop and re-start it).

If the box is greyed out and you have a 3rd party graphics card, google your card and see if it supports openCL. If it does not, you're out of luck on this front. If it supports openCL but the box is greyed out, google "add video card to photoshop list". There's a simple text file and you can add the name of the card (you'll need the exact text for it). If you add it, it will discover the card and enable the relevant features. It won't break anything.

Next - you need to make sure that your photoshop is running in 64 bit mode (really, at this stage in the game, nobody who uses photoshop should still be running in 32 bit except for exotic legacy plugins).

I used to find that Photoshop was often trying to open files in 32 bit mode. Photoshop can only access a tiny portion of memory in 32 bit mode compared to 64 bit mode. I tried several methods, but in the end, the only way I was able to consistently break this habit was to completely uninstall my entire Adobe Suite and re-install it, making sure that when I chose to install Photoshop that I deliberately unchecked the Photoshop (32 bit) option. Dumb coding on Adobe's part.

You can check which mode your photoshop is running in by going to the Edit Preferences (Ctrl-K) and Performance. You will see much less memory available when running in 32 bit mode. If memory serves, it will assume a max of 3gb RAM for the system and still be only using a percentage of that.

For my system, that means it can use around 1.5gb in 32 bit mode compared to 10.5gb in 64 bit mode. A *HUGE* difference in performance.

When I was working on 16 bit TIFF images doing background extractions, I would run into this "slowdown" after 2-3 clicks (usually using brush tool in a mask). I believe it was related to the fact that I use 40 steps of "undo" and it was overloading the RAM allocation. I would guess that if you are copying and pasting back and forth between PS and Word, you might be exacerbating this issue. Office likes to keep stuff in the clipboard space as long as possible.

Once I got rid of 32 bit PS and got my video card enabled in PS, I was good to go and back on the road for full speed ahead.