Illy CS3 SO SLOW

[jessicam]

Illustrator CS3 insists on redisplaying the filters/effects every time I sneeze. It's killing me. It takes a couple of minutes every single time it decides, apparently randomly, to do this. I need to work on these (client-created) files, so I was hoping there was a way to tell it to stop redisplaying and just give me a quick and dirty preview while I work.

[GraphixNPrint]

do you have 2 gigs of memory in the machine... all of the CS3 products seem to require at least this much.

[jessicam]

Nope, 1.25. My machine is upgradable to 1.5, pretty much a dinosaur. :(

Illy does seem to run ok as long as I don't have crazy filters and effects going on. I downgraded flash and DW to 8 because I had them and they run a lot better. The next version back I have of Illy is 10. :/

[GraphixNPrint]

Dont feel bad if you HAVE to revert to 10... I run 9 on this machine, and new versions on my other machines. It just takes some getting used to switching between them.

[hewligan]

Y'know, my iMac at home only has 1 gig or RAM in it, and the CS3 apps run just fine. Of course, it's my home box, and I'm not running more than a couple of them at a time. At work, where I have everything running at one, our IT department - after much whining from me - have packed my machine with as much RAM as it will take.

Still, you can run CS3 well enough in 1 gig.

But slow redraws are unlikely to be solely a memory issue. The bottleneck there's more often a matter of processor speed. So, not much you can do about that.

There are a bunch of display quality settings in the preferences, and turning those down may help, depending on the artwork you're dealing with. Otherwise, for extremely complex artwork, it may pay you to work in ouline mode (cmd-y).

[jessicam]

Dang why didn't I think of that. Thanks, hewligan! :D

[Blak_Phoenix]

^^ Yep i only have 1GB of RAM in this machine and i can run Illustrator, PS and InDesign without a problem (untill i start working on files in excess of 300mb in photoshop, then my laptop grinds to a halt). *wishes for an upgrade for crissy* :D

[urstwile]

Jessicam, you didn't mention whether you were on a Mac or PC, but if you're on Mac, you might also want to check to see if the font manager you're using doesn't have a lot of fonts loaded that stay active all the time. This'll slow things down. Not to mention perhaps deleting caches, and stuff like that. I try to clean that stuff out periodically and it definitely helps.

[PrintDriver]

Also check your scratch disk setting under preferences. If your scratch disk is nearly full (ie if your scratch is set to hard drive and it is nearly full) Illy has to search longer for places to put its background work. I always partition my hard drive to give a free sector for scratch.
(NB: Partitioning erases your hard drive! Save it for when upgrading to next kitty cat OS if on a Mac)