LR Loading Problem

[John R Smith]

Friends

I have just spent the last week setting up a new Windows 7 PC for my digital photography. This has involved transferring all my data, installing my software, and setting up my peripherals (printer, screen, external drives etc). I’ve never used Win 7 before, so this has been quite a steep learning curve for me.

The new PC is nothing special (I couldn’t afford much), just a little Acer laptop with 4 GB RAM and a 500 GB drive, but it is a great deal better than the XP one I was using previously. I am running Win 7 64 bit. There are various rather strange problems and issues with this new setup, which are probably the result of my inexperience with Win 7. But the strangest issue which I can’t seem to figure out is as follows –

I installed Lightroom 2.6 and all was well at first. It loaded much faster than on the old PC, and I got all my presets and templates organised OK, and life was good. But suddenly, for no apparent reason whatsoever yesterday, it has behaved really strangely when loading. When I double-click the LR desktop shortcut, the revolving “wait” symbol appears briefly, and then vanishes, and the whole PC just seems to hang for about 15 secs. Then, LR starts loading, but with just a white frame rather than the black background and splash screen, which just doesn’t look right. Eventually, it does load, and everything seems to function normally thereafter. I just can’t think what I might have done to cause this. PS Elements loads fine, and is blisteringly quick compared with the old PC.

If anyone has any ideas, I would be very grateful.

John

[PeterAit]

Friends

I have just spent the last week setting up a new Windows 7 PC for my digital photography. This has involved transferring all my data, installing my software, and setting up my peripherals (printer, screen, external drives etc). I’ve never used Win 7 before, so this has been quite a steep learning curve for me.

The new PC is nothing special (I couldn’t afford much), just a little Acer laptop with 4 GB RAM and a 500 GB drive, but it is a great deal better than the XP one I was using previously. I am running Win 7 64 bit. There are various rather strange problems and issues with this new setup, which are probably the result of my inexperience with Win 7. But the strangest issue which I can’t seem to figure out is as follows –

I installed Lightroom 2.6 and all was well at first. It loaded much faster than on the old PC, and I got all my presets and templates organised OK, and life was good. But suddenly, for no apparent reason whatsoever yesterday, it has behaved really strangely when loading. When I double-click the LR desktop shortcut, the revolving “wait” symbol appears briefly, and then vanishes, and the whole PC just seems to hang for about 15 secs. Then, LR starts loading, but with just a white frame rather than the black background and splash screen, which just doesn’t look right. Eventually, it does load, and everything seems to function normally thereafter. I just can’t think what I might have done to cause this. PS Elements loads fine, and is blisteringly quick compared with the old PC.

If anyone has any ideas, I would be very grateful.

John

The first thing to try is to uninstall and reinstall LR. If the problem is due to a corrupt installation, this should fix it. Otherwise I have no suggestions.

[john beardsworth]

A few things to try:

- Install the current version 2.7.
- Restart Windows
- Optimise the catalogue (you should be doing this routinely anyway)

John

[John R Smith]

Right. I will try re-installing tonight. Wish me luck  

John

[John R Smith]

OK.

I cracked it. After two re-installs of LR 2.6, and then in desperation an install of LR 3 beta, I was nowhere. I had exactly the same problem, whenever I tried to load LR the PC would just hang and then eventually load very slowly with a white screen.

So I thought hard as to what I had altered recently. And it was Readyboost.

I had thought a couple of days ago that I would have a go at improving the PC's performance by adding an 8 GB memory stick, formatted with exFAT, and configure it as Readyboost off a spare USB port. THAT was the problem. When I removed the stick, re-booted the PC and re-loaded LR two or three times, lo and behold it was working properly again. In fact loading up was  really quick.

So it looks like Readyboost actually makes your PC run slower. Terrific.

Now on to the next problem (you might get an anguished post about it  tomorrow). My new monitor hood is pretty neat, though.

John

[John R Smith]

Very strange.

The same problem is back again. Gradually, LR has got slower and slower to load. Despite all sorts of attempts to optimise the system and track down the issue, nothing affects it. I tried disabling Superfetch and cleaning out the Prefetch cache, but no change. Everything else loads fine and very fast. Once LR has loaded it runs normally.

But LR6 loads quicker and cleaner on my old XP laptop with minimal RAM and a slow HD (30 mb/s) than it does on the new Win 7 box with 4GB RAM and an 80 mb/s drive. Don't tell me to get a Mac (although I'm sure you might be right).

Such is progress  

John