Re: filmscanners: SilverFast Upgrade Disaster

[Ian Lyons <ilyons@msn.com>]

Title: Re: filmscanners: SilverFast Upgrade Disaster

Roger,

I'll need to rub the sleep from my eyes before typing next time. The sentence in my earlier post:
> > > "Unfortunately the message is erroneous - the Photoshop scratch disk REQUIRES contiguous hard disk space of approximately 5 times the actual amount of ram on your computer."


should read : 

> > > Unfortunately the message is erroneous - the Photoshop scratch disk REQUIRES contiguous hard disk space of approximately 2 (two) times the actual amount of ram on your computer. 


Something not immediately obvious to many Photoshop users is the fact that it matters little how much ram you have if you don't have the required amount amount of contiguous hard disk space. I've seen occasions were a user with 1gig of ram gets the out of memory message when only working on 100meg file (layers brought it up to about 600meg). What they failed to realise was the scratch disk was being limited by lack of hard disk space and so at 600meg Photoshop simply ignored the presence of the remaining 400meg of ram and threw a tantrum. The more ram you add the more contiguous hard disk space that you must have available for PhotoShop's own personal use - 2 times is the absolute minimum for "safe" working. Prior to PS5 the scratch disk volume size was limited to 2Gig - no it is 200Gig in one volume (from memory you can have up to 4 200Gig volumes).

The location of the SilverFast scratch disk configuration is in the Option>General tab - see the little icon to the left of the "Scratch Disk" text.


Photoshop and Windows - General Advice on Swap File and Scratch Disk

Anyone else reading this message with Windows (any version) and a single hard disk would do well to configure Windows for a fixed swap file with maximum and minimum values being 1.5 times the total installed ram. Some folk suggest 2 times, but Microsoft are adamant that 1.5 is the default and that a higher value requires changes to be manually made within the registry (I'm not arguing <g>). Make sure you defrag the hard disk before doing this. Using this configuration means Windows gets its own swap file allocation in a fixed location and Photoshop gets to play on the rest of the available disk space. If Windows and Photoshop are allowed to do battle over the same area of hard disk space Windows will ALWAYS win! If I can track down the Microsoft and Adobe documentation that recommends this configuration I'll post the links.

Ian

Ian Lyons
http://www.computer-darkroom.com

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