Please advise on how to improve PC performance using lightroom 3

mikeyw

mikeyw

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Hi,

I'm really noticing LR 3.4 is struggling on my PC, just scrolling through images to work on in the devop module can take up to 30secs to 'load' the image, when copying settings between images the same happens.

Export images to disk seems to take an absolute age as well.

Here are the details of my PC :-


System Model HP Compaq dc7700p Small Form Factor
System Type x64-based PC
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13GHz, 2133 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 3.50 GB
Total Physical Memory 3.49 GB
Available Physical Memory 1.26 GB
Total Virtual Memory 6.98 GB
Available Virtual Memory 4.54 GB
Page File Space 3.49 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys


Would more memory help - will my version of windows support more memory ?....assuming as it's 64-bit it will.

My C: drive is a 300Gb SATA disk :-

Model Hitachi HDT725032VLA360 ATA Device

Yes SSD would help i'm sure but might wait until the prices come down a bit.

Anything that could help me out here guys ?

tia,
Mike.
 
I would say more ram but you would need 64bit windows and you need to make sure you motherboard supports it.
 
You seem to be running a 64bit system, so up your memory to 8gb. (No point in a 32bit system as windows only recognises 4gb).

You may find that you've only 2 memory slots on your motherboard, possibly populated by 2 x 2gb chips. If this is the case, you'll have to replace the 2gb chips with 2 x 4gb chips and make use off, or sell, the 2gb chips.
 
What the others have said...

Is the disk doing lots of accesses? If so, it's probably paging out to the swap file. What does task manager->Performance and in the Physical Memory report say is available?
 
Your system looks similar to mine


OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
Version 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601
Other OS Description Not Available
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Manufacturer MiTAC
System Model Notebook PC
System Type x64-based PC
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8700 @ 2.53GHz, 2533 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB
Total Physical Memory 3.75 GB
Available Physical Memory 2.41 GB
Total Virtual Memory 7.50 GB
Available Virtual Memory 6.09 GB
Page File Space 3.75 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys


Lightroom works without any noticeable delay on mine, effectively in real time. Importing images vis USB takes a few seconds but nothing out of the ordinary.

How much stuff have you got running the background? It doesn't take too many processes intercepting every keypress and memory address going "Is it for me? Is it for me?" to slow things right down.
 
Stratman said:
Your system looks similar to mine

OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
Version 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601
Other OS Description Not Available
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Manufacturer MiTAC
System Model Notebook PC
System Type x64-based PC
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8700 @ 2.53GHz, 2533 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB
Total Physical Memory 3.75 GB
Available Physical Memory 2.41 GB
Total Virtual Memory 7.50 GB
Available Virtual Memory 6.09 GB
Page File Space 3.75 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys

Lightroom works without any noticeable delay on mine, effectively in real time. Importing images vis USB takes a few seconds but nothing out of the ordinary.

How much stuff have you got running the background? It doesn't take too many processes intercepting every keypress and memory address going "Is it for me? Is it for me?" to slow things right down.
Click to expand...

Thanks all - Startman have you fast disk and a good graphics card ?

I'm wondering if a better graphics card might help me ?
 
The graphics card is the GeForce 8200M. It's nothing special, even using shared memory, meaning that it uses the RAM for its storage, taking as much as it needs or is allowed.

I don't think your problem is hardware related, I'd bet on one or more things have set themselves to run on startup and are slowing the whole shebang.
 
It's not graphics. A fairly educated guess is that it's something clogging your memory and you are having to swap to disk all the time.
 
Bring up the Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), then if the Applications tab doesn't reveal the culprit (it probably won't) try Processes. Click on the CPU column heading, and if the top entries are all '00' click on it again. It's now showing you what is using the most CPU resources. If it isn't System Idle Process or lightroom.exe you may well have found the culprit. If this hasn't shown anything suspicious click on the Memory (private working set) column header, twice if necessary. This will show you what is using the memory. If you are suspicious of anything, just type its name into a search engine and when you've ignored all the free downloads offering to speed up and disinfect your PC, you should have some idea of what's hogging the memory.
 
I find mine drags after using it a while. Normal work around for me is to select a different folder to the one I've been working on. Disks churn a bit to load the images from the other folder and it's back to normal.
 
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