I shoulda bought a Mac.... Ugg... (1 Viewer)

[Brett DiMichele]

Well not really!

I should have gotten 1 Gig of RAM or MORE..

Now that I have a PC with the ability to handle large

format graphics work I am putting together and printing

my portfolio. Well I decided to work with some 2400 DPI

full 8.5x11" Graphics today and my PC say NO WAY.. Crashed

and burned! Actualy rebooted on it's own numerous times.

I am SO running out of RAM (256MB) it's not even funny.

Ohh well, I guess it's time to order a gig, or two!

 

[AndyVX]

Umm, maybe I'm wrong here, but I wouldn't think it should be rebooting on it's own. It should just do a hard lock-up.

A computer magically rebooting by itself isn't normal behaviour, other than when you have a faulty part (ie. bad ram)

Well, that's just my $0.02

 

[Brett DiMichele]

Andy when XP encounters a "Critical" error that's what it
does.. In my experiance thus far.. I am probably one of the
few who has crashed XP! (it is fairly stable though)
I just flat out ran outta ram and XP must see that as a
critical error

 

[Demetri K]

I wouldn't say it's a pc thing. What programs r you using (photoshop). I do a lot of 2d as well as 3D, (rendering use to take forever). But what solved all my problems was a dual motherboard. Not really worth getting unless you have 2000 NT, or XP professional. But man I have been using Dual mobo's for years for photoshop, Maya, #Dmax, and things of that nature. Everything runs sooo smooth. even when I had my dual p2 400 with 256 megs of ram about a year ago. (plus I use macs everyday) And let me say. they are not all that either(unless if it is a dual mobo machine)!! Get the same crashing problems on G4's. So whatever machine you get next time wether it be a mac, pc, pentium or AMD. Get dual!!!

 

[Brett DiMichele]

Demetri,
Processing power isn't the problem.. I am working with full
page graphics in 2400 DPI which equates to more megabytes of
image than I have ram for.. As soon as I try and use any
filter I run out of ram.. 400 meg graphics don't work well
when you only have 256 megs of ram I guess
Yeah Dual Processors are nice but I am not that hard core
on my home machine!
And yeah I know it's not just a PC problem that whole Mac
thing was a joke!

 

[Glen_L]

Brett, you better make it 2 GB of memory. By my calculation, a single 24 bit 8.5x11 graphic at that resolution would take up over 1500MB. I'm not sure how it's only 400MB (light .jpg compression maybe?) on disk, but it would use 1500MB of memory space. Of course, if you're doing any image processing and need multiple levels of undo/redo, you're looking at even more memory.

Have you tried increasing the max size for your page file? If you have hard drive space, try boosting it to some ungodly number and see if it still crashes.

 

[Chris]

OK, you're using XP right? And your photo editing program? Remember, Photoshop keeps it's own "scratch" file to supplement, in a way, the system OS's swap file; if you're editing files this big, it should be big, and FYI, if you're using Photoshop 5, you -must- get the patches to support images bigger then 600MB, because otherwise you're asking for trouble (in Photoshop 6 this is supported, though only through TIFF / PSDs)

If you're using another program, you might want to check it's guidelines as well..

 

[Kelley_B]

Also Photoshop recommend that you place your scratch file on another hard drive.

But damn 1GB of RDRAM is going to be expensive if you have an i850 powered P4.

 

[Todd Hochard]

Man, you picked the wrong time to need RAM. It's about 4x the cost just 6 months ago. Good luck.

 

[Brett DiMichele]

Hey guys,
Thanks for all the tips..
I actualy have 2 Scratch Disks set up in PhotoShop (Running
version 4) I have 50+ Gig free on C: and a dedicated 1.6 Gig
on G:
I do need to check my win page file settings though.. I don't
think I have them set high enough.
And yes it seems like now IS a bad time to buy ram!
Glen,
Yep I was running minor compression. A straight on Bitmat
or Tiff will be even larger..
2 Gigs of ram.. I can't afford this! AHHHH
(sits in the corner and grumbles)

 

[Brett DiMichele]

Okay I just went through and reset my Primary and Secondary

Page Files.

My Primary is set to initialy use 2GB and up to 4GB Max

and I set the secondary to 900MB Max.

As for XP Rebooting on it's own, there is an option tab you

can select or deselect the "Restarts on System Failure".

 

[Chris]

Ok, a few minor notes:
Generally don't make a page file bigger then 2G.. photoshop seems to have trouble with this (though partially addressed in an update to Photoshop 6.0)
Second, with so much swap going on, you might want to make sure you have a nice, fast HD.. I'd push SCSI on you for this much work if it's going to be continuous.. but if it's not, then a 7200RPM drive will probably do.

 

[Brett DiMichele]

Chris,
My main drive is a 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda Ultra ATA
But P-Shop keeps crashing... I can't work with anything much
larger than 5"x5" @ 1200 DPI anything larger it crashes even
when I go to save... :frowning:
I am checking into ram now..

 

[Chris]

Before you do that, can I get some other specs? IE, what version of Photoshop are you running? What plugins are loaded? (any, a lot?) You're running XP, which is great.. what video card with what drivers? There are lots of factors that can figure in beside just ram (though more ram never hurts!)

 

[Brett DiMichele]

Chris,

I am not at home to check the vesion but I believe I am

currently running PhotoShop 4.0.5 the filters I have installed

are Flux,Genesis,AlienSkin and Digimark. I have 600 or so

fonts loaded to the system fonts directory also.

I am running a 1.8A Ghz P4 with 256MB of PC2100 266Mhz DDR

Ram, a 60GB Barracuda Ultra ATA-100 7200RPM Hard disk and

the video card is a 64 Meg DDR Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti200 with

TV Out and DVI Out (Running the newest Detonator Drivers).

 

[AndyVX]

Brett,

If you want, you can send me the file you are trying to use in Photoshop, and I can see what happens with it on my computer. I'm running an AMD AthlonXP 1600 w/256 Ram, Win2K and Adobe Photoshop 5.5.

I've found 5.5 to be *very* stable for me and my friends needs.

Anyways, just a thought. I'm on ICQ with the number listed in my signature if you want to try this out.

TTYL.

 

[Brett DiMichele]

Andy,
Do you want me to send you a 695MB Image file?

 

[Chris]

You're going to find that your biggest advantage is going to be to upgrade Photoshop. This will be especially true if you are running NTFS.

 

[Brett DiMichele]

Chris,

I am sure upgrading to the latest version will be a tremendous

benefit. But at the same time I can see more ram is going

to be a must have item.

 

[AndyVX]

Brett,
I don't mind you sending me a file size that large. We'd have to do it through ICQ though, because email can't support file sizes that large.
As much as I want to help you out with your problem, I think I'm also a bit curious to see how my computer would react.