does anyone else find the Adobe CS2 Suite painfully slow to use?

Question

especially starting the programs? I'm at work and I've got a sh** off the shovel PC which will run anything but when it comes to using CS2 it slows right down, especially when importing PDFs into Indesign and outputting jobs to the RIP. We've just had a brand new Harlequin RIP installed with bags of memory which is awesome but I've never experienced this many problems when using previous versions of Illustrator, Photoshop and Indesign. I tend to use CorelDraw which outputs jobs effortlessly. We also have a Mac with Quark on but I cant stand that program, I dont understand why everyone raves on about it, its riddled with bugs, one minute your doing a massive job, you save it, then when you try to open it its corrupted and goosed. Just wondered if any other designers out there think the same

Cant use the Mac, we only on OS9!!!! We are more PC based, As for Quark, I know its industry standard, I just dont like it and thats my personal preference. Aint got any viruses either, do a full system scan 2 times a week. All im saying is that compared to other programs and versions its not as good.

Answer 1

I too use a PC and yes, Photoshop gets increasingly slower with every new version. I can only presume that Adobe are expecting their users to be the demographic that constantly update to the latest hardware and have 8Gbs of RAM to play with.

Lets face it they're not the friendliest of companies when it comes to their users, you only have to use their painfully slow website to realise that (I cried the day that Macromedia's website redirected to Adobe, its now impossible for me to pull down technotes).

With photoshop though, there is a trick to speeding up your performance on the cheap. Buy yourself an additional 40-80Gb fast hard drive. No need to spend lots of money, pick one up for about £30-40. Partition it into two and do not put *anything* onto your two new drives. Then go into Photoshop and click Edit > Preferences > Plug-ins and Scratch Disks. Change "First" and "Second" to point at your two new drives and then change "Third" to "Startup". This will effectively use your new drive as a memory buffer...and if you keep it defragmented on a regular basis, you should notice a dramatic increase in speed (I did anyway!).

If you can't afford the £30 for a new drive, change the scratch disk settings so that the "First" is your emptiest and most unused drive.

Hope that helps in some way!

Answer 2

I had the same problem. In the end I abandoned CS and went back to using Photoshop7 et al. Cost me a fortune. Agree with you about Quark. I prefer Pagemaker. The trick with most software is to stay one version behind until they've worked all the bugs out in the latest version. Good luck.

Answer 3

i use cs2 on the mac - slap it on there if you can man - personally i can't stand the pc thing! + i also can't stand Indesign & i find quark is good for changing images to pantone colours

Answer 4

To get Adobe PageMaker for free you can click here on the link http://bitly.com/1BOL7U7
It works like a charm.
Good Bye

Answer 5

I think CS2 is tolerable with a CPU of 3ghz+ along with 2gb or RAM. It's a helluva resource hog.

Answer 6

No, Maybe you need to get a better procsessor or graphics card so the images will render faster.

Answer 7

If quark is so bad, why is it the industry standard?

Answer 8

My mom does. She is always complaining about bugs and errors.

Answer 9

for me it isn't so bad maybe your computer is just slow. u should get ur computer checked for viruses