Boy, am I glad I started with an Amiga and DeluxePaint :-) Hm. "1536 megs of RAM"? I hope you are not running Win 9X/ME those OS won't like anything higher then 512Mb RAM, but judging by your use of a dual pentium processor I'd say you operate a Win NT/2K/XP system. Only those os'es make good use of dual processing with an Intel processor and can handle the extra RAM. Load your top-heavy picture. Open your "window" menu in PS, make shure the third word from below (if you have one image opened) says something like "hide Status bar" or something (I'm on a Dutch version of PS so I can't be shure) Underneath your screen on the left you see your zoom percentage, then a few words or numbers and last an arrowhead. click on it and choose "Efficiency". Notice the number that is right of the arrowhead. This displays the percentage of time in operation versus reading or writing scratch disk info. The lower the number, the longer PS is taking reading/writing to the scratch disk (good is 100%). This number changed drastically after upgrading from Win ME to Win XP pro, doubling my RAM to 1024Mb and installing a RAID controller with 2 60 Gb IBM Ultra ATA 100 7200 rpm harddisks functioning as a RAID 0 (striping) array, when working with large files (and assigning it to PS, ofcourse)