Can you get free softeare that runs to test what is slowing what down on your computer.

I am trying to load a brochure i designed in corel draw and it takes 10 mins to open. I need to know if its the graphics, the ram, HD or the processor

Not sure.

It is possible to see what is comsuming your memorys resources in task manager tho?

It may just be corel. I ******* hate corel draw and even the resent patch to the graphics sute 12 didnt improve anything on performance side of things. If you have graphics on ur broshure that are beyond 600dpi resample them, that cuts down on file size and load times.

Everythings 300dpi and photoshop is the same when editing photos.

Originally posted by adaline
...I ******* hate corel draw and even the resent patch to the graphics sute 12 didnt improve anything on performance side of things...

Of course it didn't, since when did getting newer software on same hardware speed things up? When I tried 12, it messed all the CMYK colours up, generally annoyed me, gave every printing company trouble opening/importing files, even exporting as pdf!

After a nice long chat with a couple of designers I bought a copy of CorelDraw 9 (under £20 fom amazon.co.uk), never had a problem since

Originally posted by adaline
...I ******* hate corel draw...

I just ******* hate Corel Draw 12. It sucks.

Lickable, if you goto Start --> Run, type msconfig, hit return, click the startup tab, then list the contents here, I'm sure someone'll tell you what doesn't need to run on startup. That should make things at least a bit better...

PS Just checked out your website. Nice designing Adaline! :thumbsup:

Photoshop works fine evrywhere i used it. U may have RAM shortage which meens when graphics are loaded OS pages aload of stuff back and forth between disk and RAM. Also try cleaning ur disk up and defragmenting it. If u runing windows 2000/XP -> bring up task manager and u can see there which programs are usingup memory and proccessor most.

Originally posted by steev
PS Just checked out your website. Nice designing Adaline! :thumbsup:
Thanks alot steev, really apriciated :D
Also i found out last night that adobe are releasing an update for photoshop dubed cs2, anyone heard of it or used it yet? thers ment to be alot new features, oh goodie :D

Try using FreeRam XP Pro (http://www.freewarefiles.com/programs.php?categoryid=9&subcategoryid=204&ProgramID=4389). It's a great little program that will free up spare RAM and you can see loads of info about how hard your processor's working etc...
Don't worry about the name, it works on all Windows OS ;).

How are your drives set up? Ideally you should have at least two partitions - one for Windows and your programs, and another for your data files. You can then put the Photoshop 'scratch' drive on the second partition.

Having a third partition for the Windows swap file also helps speed things up a little and gives you better results when defragging.

However, nothing is better than more memory. I recently doubled mine to 2Gb and noticed a big difference.

Just out of interest, how much faster do they load if you start Windows in Safe mode?

Originally posted by Lickable
Can you get free softeare that runs to test what is slowing what down on your computer.

I am trying to load a brochure i designed in corel draw and it takes 10 mins to open. I need to know if its the graphics, the ram, HD or the processor

There is Cacheman XP - it's pretty reasonable.

Alex