Photoshop CS Memory settings with 3gb of RAM

[petercook80]

I have just upgraded the RAM on my system to 3gb (from 1.5gb) and would like to know if the following is okay. (This is on Windows XP Pro 32bit)

Photoshop CS now see's a max available RAM of 1777mb (this I understand is because of the limit CS has on memory), now because I have a total of 3gb, I have assigned 100% of this to Photoshop CS (i.e.: the full 1777mb). I presume this is okay as I have another 1gb or so for Windows XP, so I now don't need to stick to the general convention of 70% to Photoshop CS and the rest for Windows XP (as I had don’t before with 1.5gb RAM)

If anyone could give any opinions on this it would be appreciated.

[Paul2660]

I have always been taught that you should never assign 100% to photoshop more around 65% to 70& max.  You could also enable the
3GB switch in XP which may or may not give you better performance.  Remember XP needs around 1GB just to work and will easily exceed that
during operations, (when it will go to your page file).  There really is not a neat answer for Photoshop in a 32bit world.  Best solution is upgrade
to x64 whenever you can and then run CS3 or better yet CS5 (which being written as a true 64 bit app handles memory much better)  But
even CS3 will work better in a 64 bit environment. 

Just one person's thoughts, obviously there many more out there.  But having used the 3GB switch for many years, it's not that good a solution
as many other software packages (LR for example) will have problems with it.

Paul Caldwell

[petercook80]

I would agree with that on a PC with less than 2gb or so  (which as I said is what I did when I had 1.5gb) but to my way of thinking when I had 1.5gb I set CS to 70% which gave Cs about 1gb and left 0.5gb for Windows etc. (importantly with 1.5gb CS reported 1.5gb of memory was available if you set 100%) However now I have 3gb CS only reports 1.77gb as being available so even if I set CS to use 100% (1.77gb) that still leaves 1.2gb or so for windows etc. which is a lot more than the 0.5gb that was left over before.
That may be all wrong but it seems to make sense to me unless anyone knows more and can explain why it does not work like that.

[petercook80]

Well so far so good, I have cranked up some big images (about 1.6gb of my 1.77gb photoshop allocation) to push it a bit, and it all seems to work. My plugins (mainly Photokit Sharpener and Neat Image) still work and I have also had Canon DPP open as well. The only time it slowed was if I transferred a second image from DPP to Photoshop (so Photoshop had two open images both transferred from DPP) it still worked but the second transfer was rather slow. But that’s not an issue as I never do that anyway, I just wanted to try and break it!

[deejjjaaaa]

I have just upgraded the RAM on my system to 3gb (from 1.5gb) and would like to know if the following is okay. (This is on Windows XP Pro 32bit)

Photoshop CS now see's a max available RAM of 1777mb (this I understand is because of the limit CS has on memory), now because I have a total of 3gb, I have assigned 100% of this to Photoshop CS (i.e.: the full 1777mb). I presume this is okay as I have another 1gb or so for Windows XP, so I now don't need to stick to the general convention of 70% to Photoshop CS and the rest for Windows XP (as I had don’t before with 1.5gb RAM)

If anyone could give any opinions on this it would be appreciated.

actually you can upgrade to 4gb and have a RAM disk over 3.25gb using applications like http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php

helps a little bit w/ some applications to keep temp files there.