I have been playing with the retail version of Windows Vista for a few days now and am pleased to report it has all gone quite smoothly, more on this later.
There is one slight annoying glitch – although Photoshop installs fine there is a registration dialog shown on each time the program is run. Even if you fill out the registration details it still appears the next time you start Photoshop.
To solve this problem do this: right click on the Photoshop icon and select “Run as administrator”, then either fill out the details once (or select “never register” if you already have). The registration screen will not be seen again.
Windows
Windows Vista Beta 2
I have installed Beta 2 of Vista on a spare machine here in order to test its suitability for imaging. I will report back after I have had chance to try it on real work.
Initial impressions are that the new interface looks nice but drains speed from the machine (A Pentium 4 2.53Ghz with 1.5GB Ram), It just may be that new high spec machines that come with Vista installed will be ok but there is no need to upgrade existing hardware to the new operating system.
More memory = faster Photoshop
I recently spent just over £120 to upgrade my main retouching workstation from 2GB of memory to 4GB. Photoshop running on Windows XP can only use 2GB of memory directly (see below) but the remaining ram can and is used by the operating system as a cache for disk writes.
I did try turning some of the system ram into a virtual disk in order to set it as a Photoshop scratch disk but got identical timings to when I just left the operating system to manage the memory.
Photoshop is faster now when handling large files, filters such as lens blur appear much quicker than before. Worth the money spent.
There is an option when running XP to set a special /3GB switch in the boot.ini that enables windows to allocate 3GB of ram for applications. I managed to get this working (you need to add a command line switch to account for the memory allocation of your video card). However I found that my timings were not as good as the timmings I acheived before using the switch so I abbandoned it.
Windows Tip
perhaps you already use the Windows key to get to the start menu but did you know that if you press (and hold) the windows key together with the D key you can get to your desktop (all open programs are minimised).
Pressing the same combination of keys again restores the windows. This is very useful when you have lots of programs open but need to do some file management or such.