How can I speed up PSCS3 (PS10.01) ?

Question

I'm very frustrated with Photoshop CS3 on XP-Pro and would really like to learn if there is some why to get it to work as well as PSCS2 (9.0.2)?
Example: I open a white canvas 20x 30" @ 300ppi. On this I 'Place' 4 small websized (400x600px) images as 'Smart Objects' and then add a layer mask to each (a 154mb image when open). Even as I'm placing the 3d image PS10.0.1 is slowing to a crawl and the scratch file has already grown to 6.3GB. Add a few layer masks and the whole thing becomes unusable. PS freezes with "Not Responding" and then 20 or so seconds later it recovers with a scratch disk that's grown by another GB. Every time I move an image around on the canvas PS freezes again. FINALLY after about 5 minutes of poking at the thing the scratch file maxes out at 8.56GB and I can then do what I want with the image and CS3 starts to perform in an acceptable fashion. If I 'purge' the cache I'm right back to the staggered performance. Same image on my laptop behaves the same and scratch file grows to 9GB.
Same image in CS2 (PS9.0.2) opens immediately, performance is right there ready to go. I can do whatever I want, as fast as I wish, and PS9 just keeps up. The scratch file maxes out at around 1.5GB.
I'm running an Intel mobo with an E6600 Quad, 4GB RAM that I run with and without the 3/GB switch (via a boot menu). Main drive is a 10k Raptor and I have two 15k Atlas SCSI drives, one empty one dedicated as PS's scratch disk. History states is set to 10 and cache to 6. This is otherwise a very fast PC that pretty well matches Mac dual Xeon's performance in the Driver Heaven Photoshop benchmark test (I was curious <g>). So why is PS-CS3 so darn Pokey :-((
I really don't know where to start with fixing this as the same behaviour occurs on other computer's I've tried it on. I have not yet seen PSCS3 perform well on ANY PC I've tried it on. Does CS3 always create such HUGE scratch files compared to CS2? Is everyone just living with this sort of performance and accepting it as the price for getting the new features? Other posts here seem to point to a 'networked printer set as the default' issue. Did that, didn't help. And if that were so easy then it would seem like something begging for a small patch from Adobe to fix it. Lots of pros out there with networked printers..
I now shoot with both a D300 and D3 so I have to use BridgeCS3+ACR if I want to continue that preferred workflow. But processing in BridgeCS3 and then working in CS2 is frustrating. Except for very basic chores I'm finding PS10 to be unusable.
Is there anything I can pull out of PS10 to get it to be more lean and mean?
Thank you for listening, I feel better now ;-)
Russell

Answer 1

Russell,
I tried your test like Olaf did, and followed your steps as closely as possible. The scratch file was around 2GB at the stage of applying layer masks. Photoshop gave me a 30-second hang before its done writing the scratch file. Disk Monitor shows 100% write and 25% read. No other process was accessing the disk, only Photoshop. The scratch file became 6GB after messing with layers and adding images, and Photoshop eventually locked up for 2 minutes (ran out of physical memory, and started to swap disk). As I said in my earlier post, the Photoshop CS3s non-stop caching behavior just likes to get in the way. Nothings going to stop it from scratching my hard drive. CS2 doesnt do this cause it holds the operations in RAM, then writes to scratch file when its necessary. To me, the lag is NOT acceptable, cause I cant even draw a smooth curve line with brush due to this problem. I do poster and billboard illustrations, so the file is always huge. And adjusting cache level doesnt help. As a matter of fact, none of the adjustments helped. Well I think I already got rid of all the possibilities of hardware problem. Therere so many different hardware and software configurations Ive tired, Core 2, non Core 2, Pentium 4, AMD, different RAM, different motherboard, XP, Vista, 32bit, 64bit, non of them worked. Then I thought I probably got a bad copy of Photoshop, so I borrowed a new copy from my friend, same thing, even on the computer in his studio.
Since Ive tried using different copies of CS3 on different machines, it seemed clearly to me that this IS a CS3 issue. At this point, Id really like those of you whose pc doesnt freeze up for a while when opening a file above 100MB (the hard drive LED doesnt light up for more than 5 sec) to share us your configurations. Any input will be great. After all the effort and time I spend for nothing, the only thing I can think of is to try the test on more computers. Ill try to get access to some colleges computers or ones from my friends design firm, and do the test on their computers. Hope Ill find ONE computer that doesnt have this problem. At the meantime, Russell, if you plan to install more than 4 gigs of Ram, you could try Ramdisk for scratch and see what happens, even thought its not a real solution. Im not sure if Version Cue or Bridge has anything to do with this. Updating and re-installing makes no difference.
Derek