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

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.

Yeah, I noticed If I turn off the graphics card stuff, my experience is alot better.

Unless you have the newest GPU from Nvidia or ATI I would turn off the new GPU render functions CS4 has. I had to do this on my laptop even tho I have the newest ATI GPU laptop version that supports this fuction. Once I did that the switching went a lot better between windows.

I used PS CS 4 64 bit with 4gb of ram for starters. It is definitely the fastest PS yet. Closing the GPU acceleration is right thing if it is not supported. I added more RAM to have more power while editing my 1.32GB DNG RAW scans, because while opening that files the ram goes away but while editing it is not a problem. You might check other options as well. I never had any problems while using PS and Indesign at the same time and I recall playing Assasin's Creed while they were open. I often use lightroom 2 64bit and PS at the same time, and messenger and mail live is open always, and utorrent and on occasions safari 4. I don't think it is a W7 issue but related to some other settings.

I use Photoshop CS4 on my system, and it runs smoothly (check my specs).

Windows 7 uses more RAM than XP. A LOT more RAM if you have more RAM. If your MoBo supports it, then install 8GB of RAM. That, and overclock your processor to i7 Extreme speed (all 3 i7's are the same, they're just set at different factory clocks) if the RAM increase didn't help.

Yea, I think I should opt for a little more ram.

I killed aero, and things are much better off when multitasking with photoshop. For now I'll just switch between two themes I guess. Or splurge on a few hundred gigs of ram. >=D

yes definitely ram is the problem. My brother's editing machine is sporting an i7 920 and has 12 gb of ddr3 and he can run premiere (1080p videos)and after effects simultaneuosly but with Vista, it nearly eats up 9 gb of ram so yeah more ram is the solution.

ikilledkenny said:

I use Photoshop CS4 on my system, and it runs smoothly (check my specs).

Windows 7 uses more RAM than XP. A LOT more RAM if you have more RAM. If your MoBo supports it, then install 8GB of RAM. That, and overclock your processor to i7 Extreme speed (all 3 i7's are the same, they're just set at different factory clocks) if the RAM increase didn't help.

That's true. Vista and 7 use more RAM compared to XP which used only what was actually needed. Vista and 7 store recently used stuff in case it is needed again.