I'm trying to teach myself how to do basic stuff in photoshop... So the other day I downloaded a PSD file, it's about 300k... But when I try to open it, photoshop gives me an error: I've got 512MB, with only firefox and my antivirus running... And it's only a 300kb file... Any ideas? I'm using photoshop 6.0... I tried using google, but found that most people's issues were solved using "edit->preferences->memory and image cache".. But that didn't help me at all... Anyways, if anyone knows how to do it, please help! Haha, thanks...
My suggestion to you is to get and upgrade to cs something and then do a disk clean up and defragment and make sure your harddrive have the right security settings.
i ran it for a while with nothing but 256mb of ram on one of my older pc's but there's no way that you can run it and firefox. firefox is a mem whore as it is. i was using 5.5 back then and it was fine but i imagine that > 7 would probably run like shit with less than 1gb. try shutting down everything when using photoshop to free up as much memory as possible. especially if using >= version 7. hope some of this helps you out.
LOL ram isn't always the issue sometimes it could be the processor cause I am using a Dual Core with 512mb ram and I can run FireFox, IE, CS3, and MSN at the same time and won't lag. My suggestion would be to upgrade.
BTDT. Mine even ground to halt just doing the thumbs in a large directory. I agree it is the total number of processes running. Processes does not just mean open programs. My solution was to build myself a new computer. I, hope you can find a cheaper solution.
512 MB is woefully inadequate ... do you have a dedicated GPU, or an "embedded" graphics chip on the motherboard siphoning RAM away from the main system? If it's the latter, go into your BIOS and give the video subsystem as little RAM as possible. The file may only be 300 KB, but you have to keep in mind the difference between a document ( an image in this case ) serialized to disc, and it's in-memory representation. A PSD file uses lossless compression to use disc space efficiently - mainly because I/O is the slowest point in the chain. Once you load the file in with several bytes per pixel, layers, all that, and create a history session, you're asking for a lot of memory. And then FireFox is probably taking anywhere from 100 to 300 MB, depending on which plug-ins you've got installed, and how many tabs you have open. Ajax pages can be memory leeches.