I posted this over in the PS forum, but sometimes it takes awhile to get any comments so decided to post it here too in case somebody knows the answer.

I've just encountered a new problem in Photoshop7...something about a scratch disk and performance of the program.  I started getting a message a couple of days ago when I open PS.  Something about scratch disk being on the same drive as windows and that I should move it to another drive if possible so the performance wouldn't be compromised.  So I moved it to the D drive and PS is soooooo slow for me now.  I moved it back to where it was, but still the program is slow moving.  I've never even heard of a scratch disk until this came up.  Why is this happening and can I fix the problem?  I think it started around the time I had a particularly big render in Poser and the message came up in Poser that Window's was doing something with the virtual memory.  Could this have caused it and again, can I fix it?  Any help would be appreciated.

Not sure about the technicalities of it but apparently it is something that photoshop needs and if it's on the same disc as the install  it can stop responding.
I have my ps7 on "C" and the scratch disc is on "D" which is a partition drive of "C"

I don't know why you have a slow down though, mine works fine with this set up!

The scratch disk is where photoshop temprarily stores the image you are working on. I had to move mine to a seprate drive because i didn't have enough room on the original drive to be able to cope. I never encountered any problems with the move though. Use the help file in photoshop and follow the instructions... i'm not sure, but i think you have to change the path and tell photopshop whre you put it, otherwise it just creates another scratch disk in the same location and not resolve anything. Hop that helps.

Jack

So should I just install PS on the D drive and hopefully this will resolve the issue since it wouldn't be on the same drive as Windows?

This is directly from the Photoshop 7 help file.

When your system does not have enough RAM to perform an operation, Photoshop and ImageReady use a proprietary virtual memory technology, also called scratch disks. A scratch disk is any drive or a partition of a drive with free memory. By default, Photoshop and ImageReady use the hard drive that the operating system is installed on as its primary scratch disk.

You can change the primary scratch disk and, in Photoshop, designate a second, third, or fourth scratch disk to be used when the primary disk is full. Your primary scratch disk should be your fastest hard disk, and should have plenty of defragmented space available.

The following guidelines can help you assign scratch disks:

• For best performance, scratch disks should be on a different drive than any large files you are editing.
• Scratch disks should be on a different drive than the one used for virtual memory.
• Scratch disks should be on a local drive. That is, they should not be accessed over a network.
• Scratch disks should be conventional (non-removable) media.
• Raid disks/disk arrays are good choices for dedicated scratch disk volumes.
• Drives with scratch disks should be defragmented regularly.

To change the scratch disk assignment:

1. Choose Edit > Preferences > Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks.
2. Do one of the following: - (Photoshop) Choose the desired disks from the menus. You can assign up to four scratch disks of any size your file system supports. Photoshop lets you create up to 200 GB of scratch disk space using those scratch disks.

• (ImageReady) Choose a primary scratch disk.

1. Click OK.
2. Restart Photoshop or ImageReady for the change to take effect. Important: The scratch disk file that is created must be in contiguous hard disk space. For this reason you should frequently optimize your hard disk. Adobe recommends that you use a disk tool utility, such as Windows Disk Defragmenter or Norton Speed Disk, to defragment your hard drive on a regular basis. See your Windows or Mac OS documentation for information on defragmentation utilities.

This is what i did and didn't have any further problems. My take on the above though is that if you just reinstall Photoshop itself, it will still create the scratch disk on the drive with windows on it.

Jack