I have been told to "turn off" my viruscan as it uses up a good portion of ram?? Anyone here have any comments on this?? Is it true? Will I find that Photoshop and Poser for that matter WILL run better and freer when some of this other factors are switched off?? Such as Viruscans, screensavers, even a desktop theme??? Is it beneficial to actually just have an "empty" desktop??? Will this allow me to have MORE ram to function with?? And how much do having hordes of "icons" on your desktop affect ram usabilty?? If I have less, will it give me more ram to work with?? ~3D ;-)

Anything running concurrently with the operating system (ie virus scan programs, programs that watch for incoming email, etc) will consume additional RAM. On the Macs, there is a dialog box you can activate while you are in a program that will show you current Ram usage and how much is left. I do not know if Windows has a similar feature or not. You can use this feature to turn off different backgound applications and see their effect on RAM usage. The icons on your screen should be inconsequential as long as they do not represent a program which is running in the background (ie Norton utilities). PhotoShop V5.5 consumes approximately 25 MB of Ram PLUS 3 to 5 times the size of the picture (in MBytes) you are working with. If there is insufficient RAM for a particular operation, PhotoShop will attempt to use the hard drive (or whatever drive you have specified in the preferrences) for "virtual" RAM. However -- the displacement and lighting filters ABSOLUTELY REQUIRE physical, system RAM in order to work. You will get an out of memeory error if you attempt to use them with insufficient system resources. On the Macs, there is a program called Conflict Catcher that will show you how much RAM is being consumed by such things as printer drivers, MPEG drivers, etc. I believe these programs are called DLL's on a Windows machine. Whatever they are called, get rid of any you don't need -- especially printer drivers! They consume extraordinary amounts of system RAM and do you absolutely no good. Only keep the drivers neccesary for the printer(s) you actually use. I have saved 5MB of system RAM by jettisoning these programs. Hope this helps you out! -Jim

Hello, Yes turning off screensavers and backgrounds will help to free up some memory on a Windows system. Also the number of fonts loaded in Windows can have a big impact on free memory. Font manager progs are available to help with this problem. Unfortunatly a less number of shortcut icons on the desktop will also help a little. Turn off anti-virus and other programs, such as Video Shell programs, to improve performance. You can always turn them back on later for use. Every little bit helps. You must reboot to take advantage of turning these off. Serpent