At first I thought it was just because the files were getting bigger. Now it turns out it's any file no matter what. Over the last 2 or three days, CS4 has been getting slower in response to what i'm doing, with the crunch hitting today - if I am zoomed in to any level more than 50% of the image size, it slows to a freaking crawl. If I try to draw with a brush, for example, i get the initial dot, then it waits for ten seconds, and draws a straight line to wherever I let go of the mouse. If I try to move a layer, same idea. Zooming is bloody slow as well.

As i say, everything was peachy until a few days ago, and the serious slowdown started last night. It's completely unuseable now.

I can swap back to 7, I suppose, I never did uninstall it just in case, but I'm going to lose some major timesaving functions (nested layer folders, ability to select multiple layers at once, etc) that rapidly became second nature.

I've reinstalled the latest drivers (though the version didn't change), played with the cache levels and history, changed around scratch disks, and spent 2 hours searching through google only to find 984578903275 results complaining about how cs4 is slow (half of which get swamped with other comments about how it works fine on THEIR machine) and I tried all the fixes I could find - but none of them seem to be THIS problem - It's always been slow from the start, or never a problem.


The only thing I haven't done is remove completely and then reinstall, which I will do later today.

if anyone has had experience with this sort of issue, please let me know if/how it can be fixed

radeon 9250 (128meg, 4xagp)
can't remember the cpu.. um.. P4 3ghz
3 gigs ram
64gb drive, 80gb drive, 1Tb drive

I'm going to see what it does on the laptop in the meantime before I decide what to do with the desktop here.