Why, hello there. I am so happy to meet you!

Hi folks. I have a situation that is driving me bugs and I hope you guys can help me figure it out.

Here's the deal:

About 3 weeks ago I put four 2gb sticks of RAM in my machine. Got them from Crucial.com. (I'd had

2gbs before but took those out and gave them away so the 4 new ones would all match.) So here I

am with 8gbs and it was fabulous. Right off the bat not only my CS4 but also my

Photoshop7 both recognized the 8gbs and everything just flew.

Then a few days ago I noticed that PS7 was sluggish and, sure enough, when I checked I saw that it was only seeing 2gbs again.

I know PS7 isn't even supposed to see it but it did and it was great. The
CS4 is still fine but I just don't like it as well as 7, call me crazy but there it is.

Does anybody know how I can get 7 to see the 8gbs again. I have no problem going into the

registry but have no clue where to go. I have spent days searching for an answer but haven't found an

answer.
Searching is an art in itself and I am not very skilled at it. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Here is my setup:

Windows 7 Home Premium (x64) (build 7600)

1.87 gigahertz Intel Core 2 Duo
64 kilobyte primary memory cache
4096 kilobyte secondary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (2 total)
Not hyper-threaded

250.05 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
107.45 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

Board: Intel Corporation DG965WH AAD41692-306
Bus Clock: 266 megahertz
BIOS: Intel Corp. MQ96510J.86A.1754.2008.1117.0002 11/17/2008

8126 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory

Slot 'J1MY' has 2048 MB (serial number 0xFFFFFFFF)
Slot 'J2MY' has 2048 MB (serial number 0xFFFFFFFF)
Slot 'J3MY' has 2048 MB (serial number 0xFFFFFFFF)
Slot 'J4MY' has 2048 MB (serial number 0xFFFFFFFF)

Ziaphra said 4 months ago 11/20/2009 9:44:29 AM EDT

Does this help: http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/which-mac-options.htm
Quote: "How Much RAM is Enough?

Adobe has a page here which, about 3/4 of the way down, discusses how much memory PhotoShop can access on different operating systems. On Mac OS 10.3 and newer it can use up to 8 GB, including scratch discs!

Photoshop itself only can talk to up to 3 GB of RAM. I decided not to make a lot of trips to The Chip Merchant and just got 8 GB of RAM for my Quad G5. My time costs too much to twiddle around.

Having blown over a grand on RAM I see in Activity Monitor that my Quad G5 almost never uses more than 2.2 GB. If I was doing this again I'd order my G5 with the base 512 MB RAM. I'd then add 2GB more. This will give 2.5 GB total and be more than I ever use, running PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, Text Edit, iTunes, Mail, iView and many windows of Safari all at once.

I have used all 8 GB of RAM if I open several huge images in PhotoShop and resample them to insanely large sizes. Activity monitor never shows PhotoShop as using more than 2.67GB of RAM. The rest of the RAM is used by Photoshop as a scratch disc before using the hard drive. This really speeds it up. Set PhotoShop's memory usage to 100% if you have 8GB RAM. It won't use more than 3GB for the program itself, but will allow it to use your excess RAM as a scratch disc."

I picked this up off of this thread:

thread

PS is set to use 100% which is 2786mb. This is the 32bit limit of CS2.

This is what you "see" resp. are able to assign, but PS can use more.
Adobe tells how a 32bit CS2 and later uses RAM on a 64bit OS in their technotes:

The RAM above the 100% used by Photoshop, which is from approximately 3 GB to 3.7 GB, can be used directly by Photoshop plug-ins (some plug-ins need large chunks of contiguous RAM), filters, or actions. If you have more than 4 GB (to 6 GB), then the RAM above 4 GB is used by the operating system as a cache for the Photoshop scratch disk data.
Data that previously was written directly to the hard disk by Photoshop is now cached in this high RAM before being written to the hard disk by the operating system. If you are working with files large enough to take advantage of these extra 2 GB of RAM, the RAM cache can speed performance of Photoshop. Additionally, in Windows Vista 64-bit, processing very large images is much faster if your computer has large amounts of RAM (6-8 GB).

Adobe don't mention it anymore in the technote for CS4, because they concentrate to much on telling why better using a 64bit OS CS4 ;-), but its still true.

My CS4 still see all the RAM and is very fast. It's the PS7 that stopped seeing it. It immediately saw the 8gbs when I put it in and stayed that way for 3 weeks so I know there's a way it can be done, I just don't know what that is. If it hadn't ever worked it would be different, but it did.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER-->Software-->Adobe-->PS7-->(might be one or more levels under this)-->
Right click on memory usage and change the value.
Don't know how long it will last though.

+ in reply to...  

I don't see anything there that says memory usage but that's the kind of thing I'm hoping to find. I'm wondering if it has to do with windows and not adobe?

Ziaphra said 4 months ago 11/20/2009 11:36:41 AM EDT

It could be something to do with your bios or in advanced boot settings:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=329624

Strange you couldn'd find the RAM setting in registry. I don't have PS7 so I'm afraid I can't help you further with that.
What puzzles me is that a 32 bit app. actually found 8 GB RAM in the first place. Anyway, it might be worth a try recreating preferences as described in 4. here?

A 32 bit app cannot see 8GB of RAM. Period.

Fortunately as memory barriers reached the 32 bit addressing limit we managed to avoid windowing, paging, and bank switching schemes as were used in the past when the 16 bit limit was reached and went straight to 64 bit.

But a 32 bit app in a 64bit system will only be shown a 32 bit memory space.

Note however that if an app has a utility to see how much memory is in the system it might well just report what the system is telling it (depending on the API call being used). That does not mean the program knows how to use it :D

However a 32 bit will be able to use the entire 32 bit memory space, something it would not be able to do on a 32 bit system.

Ziaphra said 4 months ago 11/20/2009 2:11:46 PM EDT

Doh, you're right ercolano.

Actually I thought your earlier remark was quite astute, because if a 32 bit starts doing it's own swapping to disk when there is no 32 bit space left(as oppossed to the auto page faulting which is always in the 32 bit space), then using extra memory as a ramdisk would be a great help. Never seen an app that does do this, but then I don't know PS7.

Thanks everyone. I did reset my prefs when I first noticed the problem. No dice. Isn't there some thing about a 3GB switch to force a 32bit app to use more RAM or is that only on a 32bit system? I am so confused. I been searching so long I have all these stray bits if information in my head that I don't really understand. I'll probably keep going until I destroy my computer. lol! That's usually around 3AM when I do that sort of thing.It's just that I know it did work and so lightening fast that I can't bear to give up.
I'm hoping someone has had this issue and will stumble on this thread with a magic bullet. I really appreciate everybody's help.

Have you checked task manager to see if there are any (suspicius) tasks running when your machine is idle? Here you can also see the memory used by each process.
I had problems with Premiere Elements freezing, but a soundcard driver update fixed that. In your case, have you checked Intels web pages for a chipset driver update for your mobo?

+ in reply to...  

I have and there is nothing amiss. I'm not having any problems with my machine, everything is very snappy. My problem is that Photoshop 7 recognized the RAM right off the bat just like CS4 did. Then it suddenly went back to the way it was supposed to be, lol, and now it drags around. I know it couldn't have done it but it did and I want to get it back.;-)