Layer Effects Palette Super Slow!?!

Hello all,

I've used photoshop for years (always on a Mac) and recently have started using Photoshop 6 on a Windows machine at home. For some reason, when I double click on a layer to bring up the Layer Effects Palette- it takes forever for it to come up. Counting 1-onethousand, 2-onethousand, etc. it usually takes 6 or 7 seconds to show up. Anyone else have this problem? Any solutions?

Oh, by the way- the machine should be easly capable of running photoshop:
1.4 GHZ Athlon T-bird
256Mb ram
64Mb video card
Windows 98SE

I guess worth mentioning is that my motherboard has the VIA KT133A chipset on it. I mention this because I've had other little bugs/patches because of this chipset on the motherboard.

Any help would be great...

Mojo

That's not an unusually high amount of time for your Layer Styles dialogue to appear. You might be able to speed it up somewhat by dumping as many Layer Styles presets as you can....keep only ones you use ALL the time. For any others, just save them and load them when you need them.

Mine is always really slow too. Not 6 or 7 seconds though. More like 4 or 5. and i'm on a P III 866. So I guess that's just the way it is. After trying what utopian suggested anyway.

Yes Layer styles are much slower on both mac and PC with version 6 - its one of the major niggles with 6.

At work I use a new 755 Mhz G4 with 1Gig of RAM - and at the speed I work on this machine its STILL pisses me off the amount of time it takes the dialog to come up.

I had some *freeze* problems with PS. Had to wait 5-10 seconds to get the openfile dialogue, had to wait 5-10 seconds before he would load it ... heck, I could wait for every action I did in PS. It was a common bug in PS6 ... the upgrade to 6.1 fixed all my problems.

Comes up instantly for me using PS 6 on a win2000. I have 2 1000Mhz P3's and 1GB of RAM, but I don't think PS cares much unless I'm going nuts with filters and/or working with print quality images.

Do you have the latest patches from Adobe?

Well, after searching Adobe's Tech archives, it seems lots of people have this delay of the Layer Styles Dialog Box. Unfortunatley, there is no real difinitave answer that I can find. It seems to be an issue with Win 98/ME not 2000/NT or XP. It seems if you have certain things loaded you can get this slowdown. I guess I can live with 6 or 7 seconds, some people were reporting 30 second to minute delays!!!

But if anyone finds a more precise answer - I would love to hear it.

Mojo

I had the same problem, and what solved mine was taking everyting I wasn't using in my desktop (down by the clock) and shutting if off. My layer styles was taking upwards of 8 to 10 seconds and now the load in 2 seconds. All I have in the box by the clock is the minimum of the stuff I don't want and/or need running in the background.

The rumor I heard on other forums was it was slowing down with certain programs running in the background (noone knew for sure what programs, but I got rid of probably 6 different programs) and whammo layer styles opens up quick.

So in a long winded summary:

Close any things you have open that you're not using. I shut mine off all the way by going:

Start - Run - msconfig - startup

Unchecking anything you don't need to run all the time.

I'm running a PIII 866 with 384 RAM

Hope that helps ya..

Paul

What Lastic has to say on this issue is applicable to speedy computing in general.

I consult with people having trouble with their Macs and I can't tell you how often I'm able to get things running fast and smooth by disabling all the crappy and unnecessary control panels and extensions...stuff that runs in the background that take up clock cycles.

When I'm working I run only the apps I need. I don't have AIM going and I'm not connected to the net. If I want music, I use a radio or a separate CD player...NOT my computer.

I'm not sure how it works on windows machnes, but on Macs you can set up different sets of Extensions and Control Panels that load at start up. No cool screen savers, no gee-whiz Interface enhancements (used to...not anymore)...nothing but what I need to work efficiently. The set I use for doing real work is as lean and mean as I can make it, and doing this rewards me with a system that is speedy and NEVER crashes or freezes.

If you have a lot of fonts it is ABSOLUTELY IMPERATIVE that you use a professional grade font manager that can activate fonts on-the-fly and deactivate them when you're not using them. (Example...I only have 25 full-time active fonts, out of the hundreds I have on my hard-drive) Have a ton of Photoshop or Illustrator plugins that you only use once in a blue moon? Move them to a different folder and load them only on an as-needed basis. Ditch as many Layer Styles presets as you can, again only loading them as needed. The time you save on a day-to-day basis will easily make up for an occasional shutdown and re-launch of the application.

Perform system maintenance on a regular basis. Run your disk utilities once a week, minimum, and that includes a complete defrag.

I couldn't agree more with EVERYTHING U just posted... THat is exactly how I handle it on the mac.

On windows machines.... well its just not that easy.
I can tell you though, If you have a system that is loading a hundred different background applications at start up, find 'msconfig' and the 'startup' tab and uncheck all that crap...

What Utopian posted holds true on the PC as well. I come from the mac.... but at home I generally use the PC... (that imac's screen is just too small.) A bunch of crap running while running photoshop, The question is not IF you have problems..... but, WHEN

Do a ctr+alt+delete.....

how many things are in that list.... I have 5 and my browser is one of them.