Adobe Photoshop Question ... primary scratch ... primary paging

[Arc-sama]

I just used CCleaner to clean things up from windows, application and the registry and I opened adobe Photoshop and got this message pop up.

You currently have Adobe Photoshop's Primary Scratch and Windows' primary paging file on the same volume, which can result in reduced performance.  It is recommended that you set Adobe Photoshop's Primary Scratch volume to be on a different volume, preferably on a different physical drive.

What are the Primary Scratch and Primary Paging File?? ... Can I just ignore it or do I really need to move Photoshop to a different hard drive???


OS: XP Media Center Edition 2002 SP3
Adobe Photoshop 7.0

[ilk3000]

I would recommend upgrading.

[zherok]

It's just going to say the same thing with an upgraded copy.

Anyway, no. You set the scratch page separately from the installation. It's just recommended because otherwise they compete for the same hard drive space. If you have another hard drive handy you can switch your page file and get some minor performance gains you might not ever notice. For casual usage it's not something that's going to affect you.

You can change it in the Edit -> Preferences menu. It's under Performance in CS3, but I don't have a copy of 7.0 handy to see if it's the same for that. Should be easy enough to find though.

[kureshii]

If you haven't experienced any problems with Photoshop before that dialog box popup, then it's not an issue. CCleaner probably cleaned some of PhotoShop's registry settings, resulting in it "forgetting" that it has asked you that question before, so now it's asking you again. If you don't want this to happen every time you run CCleaner, make sure you uncheck Photoshop under the Applications tab.

[Arc-sama]

Thanks Guys.  I am getting a sweet copy of CS4 from my tech guy soon.

@ Zherok
There is no Performance section (at lease not one marked as such) in the Preferences for 7.0, I just checked. But since you said it isn't something that I have to worry about I'm going to just ignore the message.

@ Kureshii
Thanks you for the tip, I don't run CCleaner offen. I will go change the setting before I forget.

[zherok]

Nah, you'll probably never notice it. I run PS:CS3 off a laptop with no issues. Only other hard drive is an external USB. Ain't using that for a page file.

[Xyresic]

The Windows paging file is the file where Windows writes all the RAM whose processes aren't using. Basically is you have two programs which require a lot of RAM, it makes no sense to have both programs loaded onto RAM - either if you don't have enough RAM or some other case. Thus, there's this "Virtual RAM" - the paging file. So Program 1 would run off RAM, and program 2's information would be stored in the paging file. When you switch programs, the RAM and the paging file would swap - sometimes why it takes Windows a few seconds to switch to another application.

The Photoshop scratch file is basically the same thing, it stores information which don't need to be permanently kept. Such files include "History" of the document, so you can undo changes.

So if you do have another HDD, it would make sense to keep both on two different hard drives, but as mentioned, for causal usage it wouldn't really effect usage.

[kostya]

The Windows paging file is the file where Windows writes all the RAM whose processes aren't using. Basically is you have two programs which require a lot of RAM, it makes no sense to have both programs loaded onto RAM - either if you don't have enough RAM or some other case. Thus, there's this "Virtual RAM" - the paging file. So Program 1 would run off RAM, and program 2's information would be stored in the paging file. When you switch programs, the RAM and the paging file would swap - sometimes why it takes Windows a few seconds to switch to another application.

If you want to get exact about it, you OS tries to predict what RAM is not going to be used soon (usually looking at what has not been used in a while) and store that in the page file if you start running short on RAM.

[Lupin]

So if you do have another HDD, it would make sense to keep both on two different hard drives, but as mentioned, for causal usage it wouldn't really effect usage.

Placing the page file in another harddrive in the same IDE channel is the same as placing it in the same harddrive. While this may be moot now that most drives use the SATA interface, it's worth mentioning

[Arc-sama]

Wow, I wasn't expecting more replies after the initial ones.

Thanks you very much Xyresic, Kostya & Lupin for all the info.

[kostya]

So if you do have another HDD, it would make sense to keep both on two different hard drives, but as mentioned, for causal usage it wouldn't really effect usage.

Placing the page file in another harddrive in the same IDE channel is the same as placing it in the same harddrive. While this may be moot now that most drives use the SATA interface, it's worth mentioning

Really? I would assume the issue with placing them on the same hard drive is that it is even slower (since you are now using 2 disk operations from 2 regions from the same drive to accomplish a task). If you have 2 drives on the same channel, they are only sharing a controller. I would think that the biggest source of latency is the disk, not the controller on the mobo.

[Lupin]

Really? I would assume the issue with placing them on the same hard drive is that it is even slower (since you are now using 2 disk operations from 2 regions from the same drive to accomplish a task). If you have 2 drives on the same channel, they are only sharing a controller. I would think that the biggest source of latency is the disk, not the controller on the mobo.

Although you can connect two drives at a time on a single channel, only one drive (master or slave) can be serviced by controller at a time. The master drive has priority. This isn't a problem with SATA drives since each drive is connected to a different channel.