I'm a little new to Photoshop, although my brother (a graphic designer) has been helping me. My problem is, almost everytime I try to get creative in PS, I get the Blue Screen of Death and my computer reboots. I can do simple stuff like adding a signature to my Bryce renders, and adjust curves to lighten or darken a pic, but if I try to go further, it crashes. I'm getting frustrated to the point where I'm thinking of uninstalling the program. I'm using it on a 946 MHz Compaq notebook running Windows XP, with 240 MB ram. I've tried adjusting the memory allocation, but that messed up the other applications. I've tried turning off most of my fonts, but that did nothing. Could anyone tell me if they've also had problems with PS7 on XP machines? I'm at my wits end. Thank you.

I'm not on XP, but 946MHz? What do the memory requirements say again? That seems kinda low.... You could try re-installing if you don't want to upgrade your computer.

It ran on my old computer with no trouble. That one was only 188 MHz with 48 MB ram. My brother uses it on a Win98 and a Win2000 machine. That's why I think it's XP that might be the problem.

I'm on a desktop but it's running WinXP Pro with 550MHz and 384mb ram. I have 842 fonts installed. I never had a problem.

You do mention other applications. How many other programs are you running at the same time? What size file are you working on in PS7? Make sure your History States and Cache levels aren't set too high and the Memory Usage set at reasonable percentage. BTW .. it's best to open Photoshop last.

hey andrian, it may be that your prefs file is corrupted. Try deleting it (ctrl/alt/shift - during program launch), also look at how your PS scratch disk is set up.

Go to Edit>Preferences>Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks, and change the First from "Start up" to "C:" unless you have your drive partitioned, in which case set your First to the largest partition.

Don't set your memory allocation to more than 75% to 80% of your available RAM (to be used by Photoshop). Any more than that and you'll hose the operating system.

Hope this is helpful, (it's also why i still use Win98@home and 2000@office)

:)
retrocity

Thank you for your great suggestions. Unfortunately, they didn't solve the problem. At this point in time, I have uninstalled PS7 from my system. I'm going to try either reinstalling it or an earlier version and see if that works.

Photoshop is a ram hungry beast. I have never had it run right with less than 512mgs of ram. Or you have to work on real tiny picturea. Also you have to make sure your scratch files are set right. If all you have is one hard drive then you have to set C as you scratch. I run a second hard drive, 80gig, partitioned in to three drives. So scratch is set to the three partitions first and the 4th scratch goes to C drive. By the way I use 6.5 most of the time..I hate vers 7....so there may be some idiosyncrasy in 7 I am not aware of. I would go to Adobes site and check with their forums. They are also very helpful.

I like 7. i m h o it's humans who have idiosyncrasy lol... We all know Win 98, and 2000 and XP are not machines threy are OS (that run on dos... and IE). perhaps when I can all use this os without a manual by my side I can actaully get some work done. As for me and my Mac we're just going to keep on truck'n. goes back under rock

haha...i have the same problem. That blue screen of death seems to be common on laptops. The only solution is more ram i believe. I have a 1 ghz on mine and 256 ram and I deal with that all the time. Just save often and don't run any other progs while using photoshop. Does anyone know where i can find more textures?

Mayang's textures