mem upgrade?

PooMan UK said:

Hiya Yamaha pal.

One of the problems with allot of graphics packages PS being one of them is they use a scratch disk. This is used by Photoshop to replace physical RAM. This is defined in Photoshop's preferences. To work best the program needs free space on the scratch disk equal to about 4 times your file size. If you do not have this much free space you may get an inadequate memory message while editing your picture. Normally it is best to either have a very large hard drive to work with or have a separate disc for use in image editing.
If you’ve got 4GB and are still hitting the scratch disk, you will probably see significant benefit from adding RAM. You could get up to a 40% speedup when working on large files that hit the scratch disk by increasing RAM from 4GB to 6GB.

Hope this helps a bit

Photoshop hits the scratch disk for many operations no matter how much memory you have. Even on a very fast system with lots of memory, PS may take several seconds on operations. like sharpening, for large images - because it writes to scratch. So if you are bit level manipulating large images and it is taking, say, 5 seconds, that would be normal. What you describe sounds worse than this, so I doubt it is because of scratch. If what I am describing is what you see, more RAM probably won't help.

stormy13 said:

cluberti said:

According to HP, that laptop can handle 4GB RAM at a maximum, so probably 2x2GB.
Product Specifications - HP Customer Care (United States - English)

Which also means that unless the bios has the memory remap option in it, then adding a 4th gig won't make any difference as it will still be limited to around 3 GB regardless of whether he runs 64 bit or 32 bit Windows.

how would i figure out if i can add a 4th gig? also, does anyone have anymore info about ading the 4gig thumb drive to help? cuz i have one of those available...

and on a side note, i have not been able to get the extra memory yet just cuz i can get it cheaper online and have not had time to order it yet, but i was doing some photo editing and was able to bring up the task manager when it started freaking out and freezing and it CPU usage histry was moving normal and it seemed that the physical memory usage was pegged at 50%? would not go any higher... it hit 53% once, then back to 50% and then about a minute later it jumped up past 90% and then a few seconds after that everything started to work again? what would cause the system to only use 50% memeroy? could a stick be going bad? could it be a setting somewhere in windows or within photoshop?