Why I refuse to upgrade my favorite program on Earth.
“Photoshop CS3 is a 32-bit application. When it runs on a 32-bit operating system, such as Windows XP Professional and some versions of Windows Vista, it can access the first 2 GB of RAM on the computer.The operating system uses some of this RAM, so the Photoshop Memory Usage preference displays only a maximum of 1.6 or 1.7 GB of total available RAM. If you are running Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2, you can set the 3 GB switch in the boot.ini file, which allows Photoshop to use up to 3 GB of RAM.
Important: The 3 GB switch is a Microsoft switch and may not work with all computers. Contact Microsoft for instructions before you set the 3 GB switch, and for troubleshooting the switch. You can search on the Microsoft support page for 3gb for information on this switch.
When you run Photoshop CS3 on a computer with a 64-bit processor (such as a, Intel Xeon processor with EM64T, AMD Athlon 64, or Opteron processor) running a 64-bit version of the operating system (Windows XP Professional x64 Edition or Windows Vista 64-bit) and with 4 GB or more of RAM, Photoshop will use 3 GB for it’s image data. You can see the actual amount of RAM Photoshop can use in the Let Photoshop Use number when you set the Let Photoshop Use slider in the Performance preference to 100%. The RAM above the 100% used by Photoshop, which is from approximately 3 GB to 3.7 GB, can be used directly by Photoshop plug-ins (some plug-ins need large chunks of contiguous RAM), filters, or actions. If you have more than 4 GB (to 6 GB), then the RAM above 4 GB is used by the operating system as a cache for the Photoshop scratch disk data. Data that previously was written directly to the hard disk by Photoshop is now cached in this high RAM before being written to the hard disk by the operating system. If you are working with files large enough to take advantage of these extra 2 GB of RAM, the RAM cache can speed performance of Photoshop. Additionally, in Windows Vista 64-bit, processing very large images is much faster if your computer has large amounts of RAM (6-8 GB).”
WTF? Only the most incredibly bodacious display of software engineering floating within the human collective today… Oh, Photoshop, how I love thee. Why can’t Adobe compile a 64-bit version of this already? Geez. My new home base of operation is terrific and making me itch to edit/develop photos on it, but nooooo… still 32-bit, still unable to allocate the 8 GB of RAM begging to make my workflow faster, and still shackled by the chains of legacy Windows.
I’m not getting on a soapbox today. I’m just frustrated.
This is why I lurv Linux (and just about any flavor of true *nix for that matter). I have an account in town that has a slew of these puppies crunching away at seismic geophysical data. These systems have up to 128 multi-core processors and half a terabyte of RAM… per unit… all addressable. It makes my itty bitty request seem so reasonable when you think about it.
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