Anyone else have horrible stability issues with CS4?

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fly my pretties

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I cannot get to grips with how bad this seems to be getting for me. CS3 and every other iteration of PS that I have owned has always been rock solid.

CS4 is a completely different story. I just lost six hours of work when I went to use the liquify tool and suddenly photoshop just disappeared.

I purchased Nik Silver Efex the other day, and that's exactly the same. I can only use it ONCE PER INSTANCE of photoshop. ie, if I want to use the plugin more than once, I'll either have to close photoshop and reopen it, or it'll crash photoshop, or the plugin just won't invoke at all.

This has been the same since I upgraded to CS4, I really can't be bothered with Adobe's horrible techn support, but I wonder if this is just me who has these issues.

The memory usage of this program is also ridiculous. It's memory management system is utterly useless. I can close save and close ten images, and photoshop will still be using 2gb of memory. It gives none of the pagefile back when you close.

Along with the downright lazy speed of Lightroom, I'm honestly beginning to feel like Adobe programs work against me.

Yes, I should've saved the image, but I was in a groove, and completely forgot. Lesson learned, but damn, I remember the days when I could leave photoshop open with twenty PSD's loaded for two or three weeks at a time.

Adobe, in my opinion, have really taken a backward step with CS4
 
I'll argree it's fairly processor intensive, but I don't argree it's less stable, I found CS2 easily the least stable of the bunch (and I was a beta tester) that would crash and burn and the slightest excuse. On the other hond CS4 seems very stable, if slightly slower than CS3.
Are you using the latest updates 5.5 and what OS are you on, I remember some issues with Mac compatability when it was launched.
 
What has CS4 got that CS2 hasn't? I can't imagine it to have much more, when they release
new software they normally just change the badge & make it look as if it's different...
I use CS2 as it's solid like you said, and has everything I need & more ;) And I use
XP Pro cause I hate Vista...

Just a thought...

CR
 
It could be a simple one off, a bad driver for example.

Im running Windows 7 64bit with 8 gig of memory and an intel quad core, CS4 64bit set to use 6gig and it only crashed once, and that was due to another 3rd party software.

I have downloaded the demo of Silver Efex Pro and run it within the 32 bit version of CS3 (patched to 11.01) and have found it to be stable and fast. I have had various images open running Silver Efex on all the images and not had one problem.

I can't comment on the memory usage really, as I have plenty for CS4 and windows but never run into any issues, even loading a couple of gig (panoramic) image. I can do more in CS4 than I could in CS3, due the fact I can utilize the whole of my memory in 64bit.

As for photoshops pagefile mine dumps about 1.6gig onto a temp drive devoted to photoshop running the 32bit version, on the 64bit version it rarely uses the swapfile as it's all in memory (unless I have lots of images open)

For me this is the best version to date, it's fast, might use a few cpu cycles but on a quadcore its not noticable. The extra speed you gain from the GPU when throwing the images around makes a big differance compared to the other released versions.



I hope you manage to solve your problem, as I believe this is just an isolated case. Bad driver, windows or mac just having a paddy.
 
Photoshop used to crash for a past time on our macs at work, adobe software update seemed to fix the problems.
 
OK, this is interesting, it looks like it's just me then. Thank God, at least that means there's a fix. My computer isn't the greatest in the world. It's just a quad core AMD with 2gb of ram and XP, on account of the fact that I cannot stand Vista.

Maybe it's time for a fresh install of windows and CS4 to see if that fixes my problem.
 
fly my pretties said:
OK, this is interesting, it looks like it's just me then. Thank God, at least that means there's a fix. My computer isn't the greatest in the world. It's just a quad core AMD with 2gb of ram and XP, on account of the fact that I cannot stand Vista.

Maybe it's time for a fresh install of windows and CS4 to see if that fixes my problem.
Click to expand...

did you check for updates as soon as you loaded it? some times there are updates available almost as soon as a program is relelased.hth mike :thumbs:
 
Cybershot Rob said:
What has CS4 got that CS2 hasn't? I can't imagine it to have much more, when they release
new software they normally just change the badge & make it look as if it's different...
I use CS2 as it's solid like you said, and has everything I need & more ;) And I use
XP Pro cause I hate Vista...

Just a thought...

CR
Click to expand...

Theres a lot of new stuff in CS4 theres a B+W palette, tabbed windows, 3d support, smart objects and smart filters, content aware scalling, a new ajustments palette, better dodge and burn tools, better sharpening in ACR, selective ajustment in ACR, new cloning tools and lots more I can't think of at the moment.
CS5 isn't that far away so it's probably better to wait if your managing ok with CS2, I think theres going to be some big changes due.
 
Ive got CS4 and it seems ok

Got a Dual Core machine 2.5Ghz and 2GB of Ram

I usually have Photoshop, Dreamweaver and 5-6 Tabs open in Firefox and still got over a 1Gb of RAM left and CPU idles nicely
 
Do a fresh install. I have CS4 and Silver Efex running on an decrepit machine running XP with only 512of RAM, and I have had no issues whatsoever, even running multiple images and with Adobe Bridge, Corel PSP and Photo Dynamic HDR all open simultaneously.

Try running The Gimp, though, and everything grinds to a halt, even if no other programmes are running.
 
swanseamale47 said:
Theres a lot of new stuff in CS4 theres a B+W palette, tabbed windows, 3d support, smart objects and smart filters, content aware scalling, a new ajustments palette, better dodge and burn tools, better sharpening in ACR, selective ajustment in ACR, new cloning tools and lots more I can't think of at the moment.
CS5 isn't that far away so it's probably better to wait if your managing ok with CS2, I think theres going to be some big changes due.
Click to expand...


Thanks for taking trouble to list all that new stuff...I might look into
it in due course, or when I might think I need those new add-ons...

CR
 
Have you checked your performance settings in prefrences? My CS3 at work has a habit of dumping all its settings and reverting to default.
Also check what your PS is using for a scratch disc, maybe using some tiny partitioned section of your drive.
 
the only times ive had problems with any adobe software, it has been because they are running in a VM. I think a fresh install (and a look at win 7) with all win updates (this includes checking drivers for motherboard) and adobe updates would serve you best at this stage.
good luck
 
I've run Photoshop on a laptop with only 1.25gb of memory and although it was a bit slow with large files it worked fine. CS4 runs fine in my Mac and Lightroom runs fairly fast on both the Laptop and now on the Mac.

I winder if you've got accumulated rubbish on the PC after a few years of use. I found this slowed things down . A clean re install may improve things, I'm always amazed how quickly my PC's run after they been cleaned out.
 
I wonder if you have a lot of processes running in the background eating your RAM. 2G isn't a lot when you start to work with large images with lots of layers so you need all you can get. I know I struggle sometimes when I'm building up layers and when I'm done working on a big file I restart the PC before I can do anyting else.
 
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