Hi there,

Some days ago I was trying to create a texture for the nudeposer4 woman in Photoshop. I wanted it to be a high resolution texture so I started with a 3000*3000 image size.

The problem is when I try to use one of photoshop's tools, like paint,stamp etc.. it reacts very,very slow.For example: when I use the paint tool it takes at least 10 sec before I actually see the result. Trying to save the image takes about a minute.

When I use another resolution like 1200*1200 ,I have no problem at all!

I have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever about pc hardware, so my question is: what can I do to solve this problem (apparently my PC is too slow to handle big files in Photoshop) should I buy a faster processor, more intern memory or even a bigger Hard Disk?

BTW: I have a pentium 233Mhz, 64Mb memory and two Hard Disk's, both with 2 Gigabytes. (My 'master' HD has currently 400MB of free space)

Now a colleague of my suggested I buy a bigger Hard disk , cause,so he says, when your intern memory (in my case 64 Mb) is full, windows uses your Hard disk as a 'back up' and stores everything to your Hard Disk ( something to do with virtual memory?)

But again what should I do?

Photoshop is a severe Ram consumer. An upgrade to 128 or higher would definetely help with Virtual memory. The less the system needs to swap memory with the hard disk, the faster the processes will be. Also, with the current prices, it would be good to upgrade to a bigger hard drive, you can get a 10 GB disk for about $120. Thuis would also help but it is not as important as the RAM issue.

40 gig drives are going for $120 if you look on pricewatch.com. I just ordered an 80 gig drive last night for around $250.

Anyway, 3000*3000 pixels truecolor is 27 million bytes, and that is a BIG!!! image, What do you expect to happen!?

Normaly when I make a texture use 12001200 on 150 DPI. Im sure a 30003000 image has to be a few MB's and that is what is slowing down your system so much.

Incidently, the rule of thumb is you need 4X the raw image size in RAM to work on a image, or 112 Mb if I use Anthony's number. Actually, that was the "old" rule of thumb, with Win 98+ and PhotoShop 5+ it is probably more like 6X or 8X.

Since you have an old Pentium 233 MHZ your board will probably not be able to cache more than 64 MB. You should check that before you buy the memory, because your computer will become a lot slower if the second level cache does not work properly. Just look in your manual and try to figure it out before you spend money.