Should I buy a new laptop for Paint Shop Pro X7?

[jezer]

My Current Specs are;
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4710MQ (2.50GHz) 6MB
16GB RAM
NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 840M - 2.0GB DDR3 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
1TB WD SCORPIO BLUE WD10JPVX, SATA 6Gb/s, 8MB CACHE (5400 rpm)
180GB INTEL® 530 mSATA 6Gb/s SSD (upto 540MB/sR | 490MB/sW)
Windows7 Home Premium

I was told over the phone by PC Specialist that those specs are enough. Today however, I tried blending 2 photo's together today and had to give up after 3 hours as it lagged far too much and then crashed.

I couldn't have more than 3 layers open at the same time or it crashed, so I upgraded to 16GB and now it's still slow but can just about do 4 layers ish. It's soooo slow that it makes before and after comparisons redundant as it can be 20 secs until the edit comes through.

In addition it keeps saving which freezes everything for 2 minuets. And the laptop makes about the same noise as a blender.

What am I missing? This laptop is only 7 months old, and should have been adequate. Should I try and offload the laptop and spend another £1000 or ditch Paint Shop for Photoshop. My whole Photographic experience has ground to a halt over this.

Does anyone have any suggestions on things I might be missing?

[brucet]

Seems there is something amiss with your system. I run a HP Envy laptop with an i5 and 8gig of ram. PSPx7. Work on multiple layer tiffs that often exceed 500meg. Sure sometimes I get a second or two of lag but never any crashes and never more than 5-6 seconds of delay with any functions. I also run other programs in the background such as Nikons NX-D and Photomatix.

I would start looking at your preferences and something else that is running on the computer at the same time.

regards

[hartpaul]

I tested on an old laptop that is about 6 years old. Running Win 7 Home Premium
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 Ghz
3 Gb Ram
230 Gb hard drive

Loaded PSP X7
Loaded 4 images and placed in layers
Images were 5616 x 3744 pixels
Blending top two images using Overlay took about 2 seconds.
Difference also the same.
No crashes.

Considering this is an older system with a minimum of 3 Gb Ram I would expect some slowness.
The slowness of your system indicates something else is causing problems.
Have you checked in your task manager to see what else is using up CPU resources.
Also in General Preferences of PSP X7 you might turn off the Auto Preserve and see if that helps as well.

[Joelle]

I didn't really want to say this, but I think the problem is PC Specialist.
I had one of their systems and after umpteen 'repairs' (back to the company) I gave up and bought a Cyber Power Systems computer.
4 GB of RAM (only) but I don't experience any slowness using PSPX8 and other programs all at the same time.

Joëlle

[jezer]

Feel free to say it.

I need to know what direction to go on this.

Something is definitely wrong given that I've got better specs than you guys on the thread.

The guy on the PC S forum site said it's probably a driver issue without going to any detail of the steps I have to take to solve such an issue.

I suppose the follow up question should be what to do now? Buy a second hand laptop for photo processing, spend big again, or go Apple?

[Cassel]

I am not a PC specialist AT ALL and whenever i have issues with my computer, i go to VirtualDr forum and ask for help.
They have helped me check and clean up virus and malwares, change memory cards, check for heating computer, install a graphic card, even revive an old computer we thought was completely dead.

It is always free and the people on there are always helpful. Give it a try. Ask them what to do to check your computer. Maybe they'll find a way to fix the speed issue and it will then run PSP as smoothly as it should.

http://discussions.virtualdr.com/

[robwa1709]

Hello everyone,

I'm coming at this from the angle of being a computer man with an interest in Photography (and new to psp), not a photographer who knows a bit about PCs. I run a team which looks after 300 users and just short of 600 servers dotted round Europe.

Tbe specs on paper are more then enough to do what you want to do with the software. The bit of evidence that everyone is missing is the sound, (you said it sounds like a blender), this is either going to be the fans, because you've got a cooling problem or one of the disks thrashing and struggling.

First off, does it physcally feel hot? THis could indicate an over heating problem. This would require a trip to the repair shop. (but make sure you aren't obstructing the exhausts). The sound could be the fans struggling.

Check your'e runnign the latest display drivers (always helps)

Not had chance to check the spec of your disks, but one of these thrashing could explain the prob. Might be worth temporariliy disabling Antivirus or look in the event log under system for any disk errors (you'd be looking for delayed write failures). If it turns out to be a disk prob, the single best upgrade you can do is fit an ssd. Do you ever get a clicking sound?

Another thing worth ruling out is Windows search. If you have a search database corruption disk IO will go through the roof and cripple the laptop. Easy way to test, simply disable the windows search service and reboot. If this proves to be the culprit I'll provide instructions on how to rebuild the search database. On probably 2/3 of the client side performance problems I see, Windows search is the culprit.

If you fire up task manager, do you see any processes hogging CPU or memory just before it crashes?

Cheers

Rob

[datman]

Hi
Since your processor is a mobile one I'm assuming you have a laptop.
Have you checked the Power settings?
Are you using battery only?
On my laptop the performance is severely reduced when using it with battery only and the default power saver mode.
It's about 25% slower
If this is the case use it with the power cord attached and make sure the settings are max performance with AC on.
The same setting will flatten your battery very quickly in battery only mode.