How much "juice under the hood" does it take to be able to properly work
with PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2?  (I understand CS2 is the newest
version.)  Is a separate video card necessary?  Would a 850 mhz machine
with 384 mb of ram do the job?

Cedar <none@nowhere.ca> wrote in news:6b4pg.22237$QI1.18107@newsfe14.lga:

> How much "juice under the hood" does it take to be able to properly work
> with PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2?  (I understand CS2 is the newest
> version.)  Is a separate video card necessary?  Would a 850 mhz machine
> with 384 mb of ram do the job?
>

Ever heard of google?

http://www.pugh.co.uk/Products/adobe/photoshop-cs2.htm

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and
attended to with diligence.
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In article <6b4pg.22237$QI1.18107@newsfe14.lga>,
Cedar <none@nowhere.ca> wrote:

> How much "juice under the hood" does it take to be able to properly work
> with PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2?  (I understand CS2 is the newest
> version.)  Is a separate video card necessary?

No. Photoshop and Illustrator are 2D image manipulation programs. They
do not use or benefit from an accelerated 3D graphics card.

> Would a 850 mhz machine
> with 384 mb of ram do the job?

Sure--painfully, agonizingly slowly. Will Photoshop and Illustrator runo
n that machine? Yes, in the sense that you'll see the welcome screen and
you'll be able to use the tools. But with an underpowered computer like
that, especially with that paltry amount of memory, you'll likely be
very disappointed by their performance.

Illustrator in particular may give you problems. If Illustrator CS2 can
not allocate enough memory when it starts up, you'll see a dialog saying
something along the lines of "Unable to complete that request" and
Illustrator will close. I've run into this problem on a machine with
512MB of RAM, if I'm running several programs like Photoshop, GoLive,
and Flash simultaneously and try to launch Illustrator.

Computers are cheap. In terms of computing power, the machine you have
is not yesterday's hardware; it's last century's hardware. I would say
an upgrade is due.

--
Art, photography, shareware, polyamory, literature, kink:
all at http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html
Nanohazard, Geek shirts, and more: http://www.villaintees.com

Cedar wrote:
> How much "juice under the hood" does it take to be able to properly work
> with PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2?  (I understand CS2 is the newest
> version.)  Is a separate video card necessary?  Would a 850 mhz machine
> with 384 mb of ram do the job?

You did not mention what how you plan to use CS2.  If you are a student
or are just learning to use CS2 then the machine you describe will be
fine.  If you are a pro moving from some other product then it will run
slow.  If you are a pro in the right environment even a slow machine
could be worked around but the danger is that it will increase the risk
of others seeing your intermediate work, which is always bad, or it
could cause delays, which is intolerable.

Good luck,
Ron

>Cedar wrote:
> How much "juice under the hood" does it take to be able to properly work
> with PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2?

It depends on the size of the image files.

> Is a separate video card necessary?

No.

>  Would a 850 mhz machine
> with 384 mb of ram do the job?

There's a description of the min hardware and OS requirements somewhere
... I'm too lazy to look it up but I think what you have is close to
minimal but might be OK, depending on your OS.

If you are working on small files for the web (say gifs or jpegs) or if
your photo images are from say 5 - 16 Mpixel digital cameras then you
can work fine with near-minimum hardware configurations.  As the files
get bigger you'll find it really slows down as you don't have enough
RAM, but contrary to other posts in this thread you probably won't
crash.  As a benchmarking exercise I've gone down to 256 MB of RAM and
ran tests with image files up to 550 MB (high rez medium format film
scans) and Photoshop CS ran fine (very slow, but no crashes).

Just curious as to why you are putting a $600 program on a $400
computer though ... if you're just learning you might give Elements a
try instead.

Bill

In article <6b4pg.22237$QI1.18107@newsfe14.lga>, none@nowhere.ca says...
>
>How much "juice under the hood" does it take to be able to properly work
>with PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2?  (I understand CS2 is the newest
>version.)  Is a separate video card necessary?  Would a 850 mhz machine
>with 384 mb of ram do the job?

Good question, but one that I cannot answer. Also, a definition of being "ab
le
to properly work... " is in order.

The last legacy machine that I used with CS/CS2 was a dual-P3 1GHz with 1.5G
B
RAM and a Matrox G-450 64MB VRam and 4 SCSI 160M HDDs. It ran nicely with bi
g
files (1-2 GB) with multiple Layers.

In short, the more RAM, fast HDD real estate, then processor power, that you
have the better.

Hunt

Bill Hilton wrote: 
>
>
> It depends on the size of the image files.
>
> 
>
>
> No.
>
> 
>
>
> There's a description of the min hardware and OS requirements somewhere
> ... I'm too lazy to look it up but I think what you have is close to
> minimal but might be OK, depending on your OS.
>
> If you are working on small files for the web (say gifs or jpegs) or if
> your photo images are from say 5 - 16 Mpixel digital cameras then you
> can work fine with near-minimum hardware configurations.  As the files
> get bigger you'll find it really slows down as you don't have enough
> RAM, but contrary to other posts in this thread you probably won't
> crash.  As a benchmarking exercise I've gone down to 256 MB of RAM and
> ran tests with image files up to 550 MB (high rez medium format film
> scans) and Photoshop CS ran fine (very slow, but no crashes).
>
> Just curious as to why you are putting a $600 program on a $400
> computer though ... if you're just learning you might give Elements a
> try instead.
>
> Bill
>

Well, actually, it's complicated...but here's the short version:  In
order to obtain funding from a specific source for graphics courses, I
needed to know if the school's computers would be able to handle the
software or not. (They do not yet have the software but are looking into
getting it.)  Since it sounds pretty "iffy" according to these posts, it
would make more sense to try and work online from my machine at home
(which is another battle with my funding source...:-( !  )  I figured
Adobe's system requirement guidelines were kind of ...um.. "out to
lunch" (as is so often the case, it seems).
Thanks for the info.

Kingdom wrote:

> Cedar <none@nowhere.ca> wrote in news:6b4pg.22237$QI1.18107@newsfe14.lga:
>
> 
>
>
> Ever heard of google?

WELL....DUH!

>
> http://www.pugh.co.uk/Products/adobe/photoshop-cs2.htm
>