Photoshop cs4/Laptop lag-PLEASE HELP! :'(

[Kimbo]

Hi guys, I have a Toshiba Satellite L750:
i7
Windows 7
With a Nvidia Geforce GT 525m
8gig memory
sdd
500 gig HD

I am NOT happy with this laptop.

I have reformated it/factory reset it 3 times, I have owned it since February 2013, supposibly brand new, swapped it with another laptop that also wasn't working properly. But I have voided my warranty by putting ram into it, thinking it would help with the speed of my computer, which did NOTHING.

Startup takes about 5 minutes... it has an SDD in it...., loading the desktop/wecome screen takes FOREVER...

Once its loaded, its "ok", but not SUPER FAST. My desktop is an i5, about 3 years older and is at least 5 times as fast.

Another issue, main issue:
I have noticed, in the past 2 or so months, all of a sudden photoshop and adobe products are extraaa...slowww...

When I draw in photoshop cs4 with my wacom intuos5 (or using the program via mouse after afew minutes), it lags anywhere between .5-3.00 seconds lag, it comes to the point there is no use for pen pressure and I can barely draw or move anything, unless I keep restarting the program every 3 minutes. The lag seems to build up and up. I have done the following:

1. Disable/enabled: GPU acceleration/Open GL drawing. -makes no difference
2. Turned undo/history to minimum
3. Deleted the preferences folder over and over before and after startup of the program
4. Set my GPU settings to performance instead of quality
5. Reinstalled Photoshop
6. Closed and restarted the program-works, but lag starts to build up after afew minutes of drawing/using the program.
7. Set RAM/memory usage to 1g max.
8. Set to Run as Administrator and set to run in compatibility mode for windows 7/vista. Still no results....

Things to note:
I am using downloaded cd's of adobe suite cs4, I LEGALLY own a serial which I have paid for. The CD's seem to be exact copies of my cd's (I have lost my originals). Photoshop seems to work fantastic on my desktop, but sadly that is out of the idea after my GPU overheating and killing itself.


I have yet to reformat to solve this photoshop problem....thinking of it as a last resort...I NEED photoshop on my laptop, as I am a graduate in graphic design and need it for future work.

 

[chobibo]

I your hard drive almost full (less than 15% free space)? Try using a different boot-up device, check if it's sluggish too.

 

[bowser499]

Probably I've helped Kimbo to sort it out, PS was 11.0.0.

 

[chobibo]

Great!

 

[Kimbo]

Still lag ... drew an icon (512x512), and on the second icon it's pretty much become laggy as

 

[Kimbo]

Hi guys, solved "for now". Having alittle less lag on the laptop due to fiddling around with startup stuff and uninstalling things. Will let you guys know if photoshop still lags. Big massive thanks to Bowser499 yet again for the patch/update to stop brush lag

Appreciate the help in chat too Chobibo

 

[Dr Super Good]

It could be heat related. Laptops are very prone to overheating when under load, such as drawing (yes that probably is quite a load for a laptop...).

Use a program like resource monitor or process explorer to check what the processes are doing. Your slowness could be something as simple as a I/O bottleneck because some silly program is constantly reading/writing.

It could also be caused by power management options throttling back performance even though its plugged in. Same applies when not plugged in but that is normally expected. I3/5/7 cores will reduce clock rate to save power when not plugged in and some OS with dual graphic cards will use the slower integrated one over the discrete one to save power.

It could also be something silly like an indexer or virus scanner running. Until it completes indexing or scanning for viruses it will put a huge strain on IO and thus slow everything down.

 

[PurgeandFire]

It could be heat related. Laptops are very prone to overheating when under load, such as drawing (yes that probably is quite a load for a laptop...).

I was about to say the same thing. Photoshop actually takes up a decent amount of performance and can easily cause your laptop to heat up. Even my macbook pro heats up decently when I am using photoshop + my tablet, but in general my laptop is pretty good at remaining cool (especially during winter ).

You should be able to tell if it is heating up if your laptop fans start to get noisy (or just feel your laptop, and it may be warm). If that is the case, you may want to look into some fan control software (there should be some for windows, e.g. SpeedFan, I've never tried it though). There are some programs that can show you the temperature of your comp at the moment. You may want to run that in the background and see how hot your computer is when you start to experience lag. If it is indeed getting very hot, you may want to look into getting a laptop fan:
http://www.amazon.com/Cooler-Master-NotePal-U2-Cooling/dp/B002NU5V4A/

That is just one example. I bought a laptop fan a few years ago for my old windows laptop and it definitely helped. They are pretty cheap too, and you can use them for any laptop really. Just make sure you verify that it is a heat-related problem before fishing out $20. I'd say it is worth it even if you don't have much heating problems, but if it isn't that then you can always save the $20 and buy yourself a nice meal.

 

[GhostWolf]

If booting takes stupidly long times too, then you have bigger problems than Photoshop.
If I were you I'd just reformat, but I like reformatting, you might not. If you don't, you can check out soluto, it's a pretty good program.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Check the I/O rate with the hard disk is what it says it should be. A slow I/O rate can cause the OS to load slowly and cause everything to hand periodically. Mechanical drives are especially well known to suffer from a fall in I/O speed as they age or become defective.

Obviously this should not apply to SSDs. But did you install everything on the SSD?

 

[Kimbo]

DSG/PurgeandFire: Thanks for your suggestions, I got photoshop working, needed a updated/patch specifically to do with my issue and I needed to disable/update Adobe AIR.

My computer does heat up alot, but not enough where I notice performance is effected. It is now summer, I should invest in a cool/fan pad. Thankyou

Ghostwolf:
I followed what you said, I installed soluto, and when I went to disable/check out one of afew SCVhosts (I know there is suppose to be afew, but this was abit suspicious at the time)... I had an alert on my avast antivirus that a rootkit was detected. Of course, it asked me to delete it and then restart my computer to scan before booting. I did that, but it was scanning one file every half second, so I skipped, saved my art files on my SD card that was in my laptop, and just wiped out the computer to factory condition.


I have a question though, I have the option of:
Factory reset
or
Wipe out hard drive and its partitions.

What happens to if I do the last one? Will I have to install windows manually with a cd ? .... Does it delete the recovery partition? I just want to get rid of bloody pre-installed bloatware from toshiba, so sick of it

 

[chobibo]

I think you'll have to install manually with a cd if you're going to wipe the partitions.

 

[Kimbo]

I think you'll have to install manually with a cd if you're going to wipe the partitions.

I'm just worried about losing the partition, as that would mean if I sell the laptop, the next user will be unable to use it unless they have their own cd :/

To be honest, I was happy with my previous black acer aspire...sadly.. it would crash with pretty much EVERY game, regardless of ram/hardware/gpu swaps/benchmarks and scans :/

 

[chobibo]

Well, you could use another disk if you have any available. Just store the original one then when you want to sell it, put it back haha xD.

 

[Adiktuz]

I do love wiping partitions... at least their contents... but sometimes I do wipe the partitions and just merge them (because back then I don't know how to actually partition them again)...

I'm using a Dell i3, and almost everything is lower spec than yours and I do experience lags due to heating too...

IDK if it's a toshiba thing, but my friends who use Toshiba laptops too (though older versions than what you have), do experience lagging issues (even without heating)