RAM & Photoshop CS5

futureal33

futureal33

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Afternoon all,

I have recently come across an issue on my laptop running CS5, where Photoshop states it cannot perform certain actions due to insufficient RAM.
I have been looking around and have found something strange...

The machine has 4GB RAM - the same as my desktop PC which never has any issues.

It is running Windows 7 32-bit.

However, here comes to strange part.
In Photoshop, under preferences, Photoshop states I have 1626MB of available RAM. Changing the allocation from 50% to 100% makes no difference and I still get the above error message..
But the question is why is Photoshop only seeing 1.6MB RAM when actually there is 4GB installed in my laptop?

Any ideas?

Thanks!
 
Last edited:
Depends how much else is running on your laptop using up your RAM.

If your desktop is using the same OS, compare and contrast what RAM is available and what programmes are running versus the laptop.

Hope you weren't expecting 4Gb available, 32bit will only see around 3.2Gb for a start.

Then your computers have to work so that can take another 1.5Gb or so.
 
It isn't classing the scratch disk as RAM also is it?
Maybe the problem is lack of hard drive space rather than physical RAM?
 
Because it's the 32bit version. Win7-32 can only see 3.2ish GBytes of you r4G and there are some further restrictions on the amount PS5 can use (can't remember where I've seen it but google should help)
 
didn't spot 32 bit. As said the 32 bit o/s won't recognise the full 4gb. Assume your desktop is running 64 bit?
 
Thanks for the replies guys

Laptop is running 32bit
Desktop is running 64 bit

Both have 4GB ram installed.

Windows states it has 3.6GB RAM available. However Photoshop only lets me allocate upto 1.6GB
Nothing else is running (I have tried closing every other application and it doesnt help).

I am using a different partition of the same hard drive for my scratch disk - there is around 180GB of free space on it.

FWIW the laptop scores 5.6 on the Windows scoring thing, and gets 6.0 for its memory performance...

Really confused at why its doing this!
 
Because applications are limited to the amount of memory it uses. Just because the OS can see 3.2G doesn't mean the app can. In 32 bit mode, I think the app space is limited to 2GBytes.
 
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