PC Struggling with PS/LR

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bildo

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Bill
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Here's my current specs:
AMD Athlon II X4 635 Processor 2.90 GHz
8.00GB RAM (7.75GB usable)
Windows 7 64-bit

Not sure which other information is required!

It's struggling when producing larger files on LR/PS, I think I could do with a fresh install but before I go through that I was wondering whether a RAM upgrade alone might be enough?

Any advice is appreciated.
 
If it's struggling on LR with not much else running then no. If it's struggling when running PS and it's due to memory limitations (open the task manager and see what's going on) then maybe.

If you're running out of memory (and LR only uses ~2.5G) then yes. If not then no. Depending on your motherboard, you may be able to put a AMD Bulldozer part in which would make things quicker, otherwise the advice would be to go with a new i5 based build.
 
Pretty limited on funds, and what I do have is currently being used on my camera wishlist which is taking priority sadly. Was hoping for a quick, cheap fix but I guess that's not the case (as always! :D)

In all fairness, it's not struggling all that much with LR, however if I open Silverefex I get the mother of all lag, it's insane, Silverefex shouldn't be doing that should it? :/

I think I might have to try a format and a fresh start, I assume going to SSD wouldn't solve an awful lot either if it's memory based?
 
Well, I'm running silverefex, seems laggy as always.

With it open, LR is using 917,488K, Silverefex 127,688K.

RAM is at a steady 4GB (50%ish)

CPU usage has been at about 8% average.

Not entirely sure why it's so slow?
 
What's the disk I/O doing?

Edit: just in case you don't know how... Task Manager->Performance->Resource Monitor...
 
C: seems to be having large spikes, but doesn't really seem to be associated with what I'm doing in Silverefex. Even now with writing this, silverefex and LR open in the background it's spiking like mad even doing nothing. Is that normal? All the other drives haven't even shown a single bit of movement.

Never done the resource monitor before so not exactly sure what I'm looking for!
 
Spiking might mean it's doing nothing and then reading a little bit, or it might mean it is reading a lot! What are the absolute numbers in the pane on the left?
 
Have you tried de-activating your anti-virus?

Anti-virus is by far the worst thing for slowing down your PC, everything you do, every file you open, every system operation has to go through the AV software.
It forms a data bottleneck, the bigger the file, the greater the backlog becomes.
 
Lyonspride said:
Have you tried de-activating your anti-virus?

Anti-virus is by far the worst thing for slowing down your PC, everything you do, every file you open, every system operation has to go through the AV software.
It forms a data bottleneck, the bigger the file, the greater the backlog becomes.
Click to expand...

Yep, that's where my vote goes too :cool:
 
Lyonspride said:
Have you tried de-activating your anti-virus?

Anti-virus is by far the worst thing for slowing down your PC, everything you do, every file you open, every system operation has to go through the AV software.
It forms a data bottleneck, the bigger the file, the greater the backlog becomes.
Click to expand...

It's only one app that is lagging badly though otherwise I'd agree. Plus you'd have to be running a pretty ancient machine to get a significant slowdown caused by av.
 
Silver Efex I've found is very slow in use, I have a top endish machine (i7 3930 at 4.5 GHz, 16GB memory etc), and silver efex takes around 20 seconds to render an image. Everything else just whizzes along as you would expect.

As I use silver efex very rarely (I find it quite destructive to quality) I can live with this slowness. Interestingly, earlier versions of Nik's software ran a lot faster than more recent versions.

On a separate note, an upgrade to a SSD is one of the more worthwhile upgrades anyway (if you stick with your current system), you will find most things work quicker and crisper.
 
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