I'm installing PS CS3. I have a 3 ghz computer with 2 gig RAM, running Windows XP. I have a C: drive with plenty of space (50 gig or so) and a second internal drive also with plenty of space (it's an empty 80 gig drive), and I have two external storage and back up drives, for photos and other data files.
If I recall correctly, I think I am supposed to install the program on the C: drive, and put the scratch disk on the second drive. Is that right? And, do I set the scratch disk space size, and if so, how large do I make it?
No idea what the 'official' recomendations are. I keep my C: drive for the OS and programs. I try not to keep any data on the C: drive.
When running CS I put in a spare 6gb drive for the the scratch disk. Now that I'm running CS3 and have upgraded to a 12mb camera I may have to increase the scratch disk size. I think a good guesstimate would be at least 3 or 4 times your largest file size. Keep in mind that layers will increase file sizes very quickly.
Your other drive (Likely E:\ or F:\, assuming D:\ is the DVD-CD Player/Burner) would be good for the scratch disk.
I'm not on CS3, but assume settings are located in same place.
EDIT menu, scroll down to PREFERENCES and on the dialog box find Scratch Disks and Plug-ins.
Take note... often on a new installation PS will warn you on your first start up that you have by default both the program and the scratch on same drive and offer to open dialog box to change.
Hard Disks are slow. The faster those disks are (7200rpm minimum) the better and the more cache they have the better (8mb is old school, 16mb better).
I've also learned over the years that the PS File browser cache can slow down certain processes. If the files in there get too large they are slow to be read and thus slows process down. This happen often when running actions on large numbers of files. I clear out the cache for that area every week. On my system its:
C:\Documents and Settings\Jimmy\Application Data\Adobe\FileBrowser\PhotoshopCS
