Speed- give me what I need !!!?

Tone it still applies, just because you don't load every single font doesn't mean that having too many won't slow your computer down. If you could load all of them and there are 5000 fonts but you only loaded 2000, that still would bog your computer down. You didn't specify the amount of fonts you have loaded through you font program. Thus I was making a suggestion on limiting the amount of fonts. As a graphic designer myself for 17 years, I activate the fonts I need for a particular project and then deactivate them when I'm done with the specific project.

Hiya Slowrey

Yeah, these days that is the way we do it- I just use a great little app called Font Expert. Has a great preview process and enables a quick activation and DE activation. Sorry, wasn't having a go at you

It is much easier that way, all programs just use the standard Windows fonts and occasionally I may add one here or there, but it runs WAY faster without a few thousand fonts installed.

Cheers mate

pparks1 said:

Bumping to 8GB of RAM and moving to 64-bit should improve things with Photoshop for you. I'd start there as it's cheap and easy to do.

If you want faster performance across the board (booting up, starting apps and shutting down), consider going for the SSD drive. The almost non-existent random access times make application launches extremely fast. While not a photoshop user myself, I believe it opens in less than 3 seconds on an SSD drive.

+1

I'm a Believer.

One thing I haven't seem mentioned:

CS4 includes a 64 bit version. It can make use of the extra RAM in a 64 bit Windows installation. The 32 bit version won't use the xtra RAM. I haven't done a lot of heavy work in CS4, but it seems to handle large files much more quickly than the 32 bit version.

Neither version launches in 3 seconds from my SSD, though. (At least, not the first time in a Windows session. Later launches, maybe.)