jedisista

[doh] Ok I'm just about bitter and so I've come to you all for help? I've been using Photoshop 6 since it was released in 2000? I believe it was and it always ran fine. I have a PIII 800mhz pc clone with 512mb of RAM and a 32 mb Voodoo4 4500AGP video card and driver.

SUddenly (recently) while attempting to use PS6 or now even 7.0 on my computer, it either
A) Locks up completely and I am forced to hit the power off button and I lose everything
B) reboots itself while I am attempting to open a file, save a file, use the text tool, use the Transform tool.....etc. and I lose everything
C) Crashes the program down and I lose everything

I have heard a few reasons, one was a ASUS Motherboard or a Dell Optimax computer, I have NEITHER of those. I have an Abit SA6R board and it has never acted up that I know of.

Suddenly I have these issues and never had before. I am at a loss. Help??? ANyone?????

jpfitness

Welcome to the board........ now let's try to help you before you get bitter [bustagut] [bustagut] [bustagut]

We need to know if this happens in any other program where the system crashes...........

have you opened the box and made sure that everything is still pressed down hard and locked in tight (from switching systems on and off they get hot and cold= movement with internal parts eventually).

your hard drive is not full? (even windows needs breathing space)

you have 512 meg ram...... one stick or two to equal this? if 2 have you taken one out to see if it is bad ram?

Is your antivirus up to date and by that is it updated today? and have you ran a viruse scan?

Think back........ what was the most recent thing you have installed before all of this happened?

Have you ran a scan disk from DOS?

if 6.0 ran okay then you have installed 7.0 recently have you tried to uninstall and then reinstall 7.0

I hope some of this will help if not perhaps it will jog someone else's memory and think of something that I haven't ;\
sfm

Update your video driver; it's the main cause of problems in Photoshop.

Even if it never failed before, it might start failing now for some reasons.

All things break. The following remark is rather foolish; "How can it be broken, it always worked fine!"

You might also consider to reset your preference file, by holding down alt+shift+ctrl while starting Photoshop.

Ask yourself if you have problems with other programs too and if so, try to figure out when they started.

jedisista

THanks for the welcome, sorry to just join and post this first off, I am just so frustrated.

Here are the answers to all of your questions:

I went to the extent of fdisking and FORMATTING my entire drive. I now have a 40 gig partitioned into 3 partitions (10.10, 20) as well as an 8.7 Hdd and a 6.4 HDD, so a total of 3 drives.

I have 512 mb of ram, 256mb each which I have not tried to reseat (but I will) so I can test them one by one.

The system is otherwise stable and doesnt really crash at all, only in Photoshop, sometimes if I launch PS and just try to barely open a file BAM RESTART!, I can use Photoshop 5.02 just fine. No crashes, no lock ups and no Illegal Operation errors and NO random rebooting of the computer.

I haven't tried to press down on anything but my tech guy did about a week ago when I had to format. I was thinking Windows got corrupted, so I backed up all my stuff and did the format. Everything was well until I installed and ran PS7....then the same thing happened. So I UNInstalled PS&, and shutdown, started back up and installed PS6. Same thing when I tried to run that.

I am trying to think back to before I installed PS7 and it seems I never had this problem, Now I do. But it wasnt right away either, I was able to use PS7 for at least a month and then it started doing this. It is so weird. I just don't get it. Even after I UNinstalled PS7, PS6 still rebooted my machine. I even went so far as to deleting registry entries after I uninstalled PS7, so it would be all clean of any Adobe product.

I have more than enough Hard drive space. So I know that isnt the case. As well I installed PS on another hard drive so I could keep it away from corrupting the OS after I did the format. Before it was all on one and had the same problems.

My Anti Virus is up to date in fact I just bought and installed Norton AV 2003. I was having this problem way before I bought and installed that though.

I have run scan disk thru DOS when the system reboots itself while in PS, it does it every time and I try to let it finish, It tells me things such as the following:

The free space was being reported incorectly, scan disk has fixed the problem. (something along those lines)

I did try to uninstall 7 and then reinstall and still had the same problems


Thanks so much in advance!

jedisista

jpfitness

okay if you have done all of that my money is on the ram......... hubby agrees with me, take one out and test it then swap them over and test it, sometimes if they are placed in a different slot from where they are now helps [confused] are they the same brand ram?......... it's ram definately [innocent]
sfm

Bacardi

Another question: Win98 cannot recognise more than 128MBRam. The rest is seen as, well, 128. This means that it will take a % of your ram, not the specific part it needs. IT also has its own scratch file. This is a part of your HDD that's used to write data on. This Winscratch file is on your C partition (if C is the active one with win on it). Photoshop also has a scratch file, and this tends to fight with the Windows one. Therefore it is recommended to place it on another partition. This is done in preferences. Did you do this?

Remember what I said earlier about the foolish remark people sometimes make; "How can it be broken, it always worked fine!"
I'm working in the computer industry for several years and there's nothing weird about it.
Things break, simple as that. You can turn on a computer and not touch it and it will still break.
The question is, if it is soft- or hardware related.
Seems to me that this is hardware related. That it?s hardware related doesn't mean that problems will arise in every program. I had bad memory in my computer and it only showed in a programs like Nero and DriveImage.
Take an average XP machine. Most of the time about 256 MB of ram is in use, that is more than 256,000,000 bytes running from here to there. Is a single memory address in RAM allowed to fail? No, because programs will fail, simple as that. You have to be 100% sure that it?s not RAM related.
Too many people ignore the fact that RAM has to be 100% ok and not 99%, period.

If you use win95/98 or ME, then please do yourself a favor and dump it.

After you installed the Operating System and I assume nothing else but PS7, you had the same crashes again. First question; did you point the scratch disc to another partition or drive; in that case, try to see if using the scratch disc on C: will solve the problem (just for diagnostic reasons).

Well, if it then still doesn?t work; hardware problem, simple as that.
You said that it always worked before. Now you reinstalled the system and Photoshop is still not working.
Check the hardware, motherboard, memory (at least pull the modules out and push them back in), check every card to see if they fit well, maybe your PC is getting too hot inside, maybe your processor has a fan on top filled with dust, maybe you overclocked your processor, etc.
You might want to remove cards to try to isolate the problem. Trust me, even a bad sound card or network card can crash any program that?s not related, even Photoshop.
Don?t get mad with the machine, because you?re in control, not that stupid thing.
That?s the way I look at it.