Photoshop CS5 Eating up my system

Question

I'm sorry for using such a broad term but it's the first thing that popped in my head. I really can't figure out what went wrong... One day everything was fine now everything is just completely off the charts.. Naturally this is most likely a user (me) error... Here's what has happened up to this point. I found some old pictures and I was scanning them in and I didn't notice what PPI I had them at, when I realized it was taking entirely too long I looked back and the PPI was set at 2400... I stopped it as soon as I could, but sense that day it seems like Photoshop just wants to take up every resource available.... I usually use 2 scratch disks, my main C: drive and an alternate, I know the golden rule of not using the C: drive but I usually have plenty of space for Photoshop to work... I have sense then taken the scratch disk off of C and put it on my F drive completely... since then it has taken up almost 35-50 gigs of my F drive and it's still using 40-50 % of my physical memory on something as simple as cropping a small 10 megapixel photo... I've never had a problem like this in the past... That's why I find this so puzzling... I can't even finish the photo crop that I'm trying to do it seems like it would just end up taking forever... Any help would be apprciated, and thank you for your time... here's my specs...
Intel Core 2 Duo
Windows 7 64-bit Enterprise Edition
GeForce 9800 GS 512 MB
4GB RAM
Photoshop CS5 (I prefer running 32-bit because I run a lot of plugins and like I've said, none of that has changed)

Answer 1

Chris tells it like it is, and makes the (very valid) point that if you want to whiz through editing, having more resources in your computer is a good idea.
Photoshop uses up to the amount of memory you allow it.  It does so since its memory management "takes over" from Windows, because Adobe has found it to be more efficient to do so.  It may be that your choice of its limits is not the best one for your particular system.
In this particular case, you did something that caused Photoshop to allocate the max RAM, and I suspect it's just not running well with Photoshop using its max amount of memory and the type of tasks that your system or other apps are doing in the background - you have some choices:
1.  Reconfigure Photoshop - e.g., reduce the max RAM you allow it to use - and hope that you can divide up the system resources better to avoid such thrashing.
2.  Reconfigure your operating system to keep it from doing so much background stuff (e.g., disable indexing).
3.  Do fewer things at the same time - e.g., don't run as many applications when you try to run Photoshop.  Also review all the stuff you have installed and running with a tool like AutoRuns from SysInternals to make sure you haven't loaded it up with junkware.
4.  Populate your computer with more resources - e.g., add another 4 GB or 8 GB of RAM.  This is listed as item 4 here, but may well be the most important thing you can do to help with a situation like this.
5.  Use the 64 bit version of Photoshop for large tasks.
You may think your computer is well-endowed, but in all seriousness today a 2 core laptop with 4 GB of RAM and an old 512 MB video card is a pretty mimimal PC for plowing through Photoshop work.  I use an 8 core 16 GB system with a 1 GB video card, and there are still some things I wait on.
3000Photos wrote:
since then it has taken up almost 35-50 gigs of my F drive and it's still using 40-50 % of my physical memory on something as simple as cropping a small 10 megapixel photo... I've never had a problem like this in the past...
I believe your recollection is flawed.  As you use it, Photoshop has always expanded its memory usage up to the max limit you give it.
And Photoshop is not supposed to permanently use up scratch space, but occasionally it can be seen to leave temporary files around...  Check the root folder of your F: drive and see if there are any Photoshop Temp* files there.  If so, and Photoshop is not running, you can delete them.
-Noel