ronmatt

I purchased yet another computer yesterday. No big deal. It's a HP Slimline with 2 gigs Ram and Windows Vista Premium. The reason I bought it is this. I wanted dedicated machine for PhotoshopCS3e, Artezin and Lightroom. Nothing else on it, not even networked into my system and especially no internet or virus protection or firewalls to suck up resources. It has a slot/port for a USB external hard drive. I'll use this for transfering data in and out. It will not be part of my work environment.
Now that you know the purpose of this machine, can anyone advise me on what services I can turn off in Windows? Again, this will be totally 'stand alone'. and I want as much dedicated RAM as I can get. Thanks in advance

Gaussian

If you only use PhotoshopCS3e, Artezin and Lightroom on this system, why use Vista? Most of the benefits in Vista won't affect any of these programs. If you use XP instead you already saved a few 100MB more than you can gain by turning off all services. Do understand that most of these services are covered by "mysterious clouds", meaning that it's not often very clear what the purpose of a particular service is and what negative effects you could experience when you turn it off (many services have more than just a single purpose and some depend on each other). Also the system might run perfectly fine with a few services off, but future installations of other applications or updates might lead to very confusing errors that are caused by some default services turned off. The question remains; will the user think months from now when he has some strange error that it might be related to a disabled service or will he have forgotten all about it and pull his hairs out for days, if not weeks?

I have the advantage that I've been an application programmer for several years, so I know how programmers think, act and what common mistakes they make. One program in which the programmer assumes that default service X is running, could lead to crashes or errors. Again, this is a good example that OS stability can be really affected by poor application programming. My advice is always; stick to defaults on your system as much as possible and not only with services if you want to avoid strange problems (in any OS). Change for example the size of your system fonts being used by your OS (like the ones being used for menus). Sounds innocent, right? You'll be surprised in some cases.

Do understand that 2GB is not the limit for 32 bit systems. You could get close to 3GB, but it all depends on the hardware you use. The point is that the maximum amount of memory that can be addressed is 4GB (2^32), but this includes things like memory on your video card and all other expansions. So if you would use 512MB video memory, then you're already at the limit of 3.5GB and that doesn't include all the other hardware that needs memory space.

The other option is of course to go for Vista or XP in 64 bit, although I have little experience with that, I also don't know whether the programs you mention can fully utilize the extra memory address space.

But if you want to stick to what you have now, then feel free to look at a site like this::

http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm

ronmatt

Thanks for the info gaussian. I didn't actually elect Vista. It just happens to be on the machine. I have the XP disk as well as the service pack 2 disk and may decide to install it. I actually didn't want Vista on my other PC.
I suppose I'll just leave well enough alone if I decide to un-install Vista and stick with XP. I haven't had any issues with XP in the 6 or so years I've used it. I've never been able to fully optimize PS, which is why I decided to get a dedicated set-up in the first place, so I really wanted to 'optimize it' by eliminating as much as I could, starting with the hoggish OS.

Gaussian

I've also considered a dedicated machine and although I see benefits, it also see a lot of limitations. Also the money I spend on such a machine I would rather prefer spending on my current system or totally different things. Personally I don't think that all the extra software that people have running on a non-dedicated machine is making it so much slower. At the most it uses 100-150MB extra and when I look at my system (and I have quite some programs running in the system bar) with task manager, then I see mostly 99% free cpu power, so I can't say that XP is such a resource hog. And let's be honest, the wide processor range that Intel offfers right now leaves you lots of options. Having a dedicated system, with disabled services in the system bar, would for example not give the same performance increase as going from an E4300 to a E4400 processor, a price difference of only 23 dollars.

ronmatt

You see, that's why I posted this question on this forum. So far I've only heard conjecture ( I'm not refering to this thread ) on the pros and cons of a dedicated machine. My opinion to this point has been based on that conjecture, which is, a dedicated machine will allow PS to run at optimised performance. But I have no direct experience to say that this is true. ( but it did make some sense ). I'll try making the new PC, an Adobe machine and load up the entire Premium suite. If I feel that I still need better performance in PS, I can always remove the rest of the apps.
Thanks

pkjain

Hi my frnd
Whats the deal! you got vista! great.I haven't read all the post,for you request has i am concerned.

Go to this url http://www.vlite.net/ and find out how u can make your vista lite.

need any other tech info or any tools regarded to vista just PM me.

Have a nice day.