Photoshop CS3 and Parallels

Running Build 5570, which is the best I've found since upgrading to Leopard, so thank you for that.

However, have discovered today that if I run Photoshop CS3 on Mac at the same time as having Parallels running XP, (768MB VM) I am lucky to get more than 5 minutes out of my Mac before it freezes up COMPLETELY and needs to be powered off and restarted.

Have reproduced this 4 times in a row. Not running Photoshop with Parallels=no problem. My Mac has 2GB RAM. Happens even with just the VM, Photoshop and Firefox open.

Any ideas?

 

CS3 for Windows is a major memory hog and requires at least 1GB of RAM dedicated to the Windows. I suggest if you are using these apps to give at least 1.5 GB to Windows or you'll deal with sluggish issue all day long.

 

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough - i'm running CS3 on Mac not on windows. I was only editing tiny icons for a website, so tha 1.25gb left for os x should have been fine.

 

Have you tried lowering it down to 512 Mb?

There is also a new build out 5582.

 

What I did not say was that I was using CS2 for Windows but converted to CS3 for Mac because it's much more stable on the Mac side. I've been running it for about 3 months now with Parallels running and have no issues.

It's possible you have bad RAM. I would consider upgrading your RAM to at least 3GB or 4GB if your Mac supports it.

 

I have actually ordered 4GB to replace the 2 in my machine, although I am dubious whether it will make much difference to this problem. I only ever encounter the problem in that situation. Having multiple other programs open seems to cause no ill effect... I have checked that when Parallels is running along with a few other Mac OS apps, I am using all of the available RAM without ill effect...

 

I am having a similar problem. If I open Parallels (5608) while Photoshop CS3 is open, Parallels just hangs and makes the computer almost completely unresponsive - certainly unusable. I don't seem to have the same problem, though, if I start up Photoshop afterward.

 

You can check disk space on Mac, and Memory usage in Activity Monitor, make sure that there is at least 1 gb of free space on Mac

 

Maybe Acrobat, too?

This may be unrelated, but for what it's worth: I noticed that using Acrobat 8 (Mac) as my default PDF viewer would really bog things down if I was opening PDFs from a Windows application (i.e. FeedDemon). It'd take 10-15 seconds to load.

Switching from Acrobat back to Preview solved the problem, so I didn't dig any deeper.

Mac: Mac Pro (early 2008), 8-core Xeon 3.2GHz, 16GB RAM, 4-drive Cheetah 15K.5 RAID-10 array
VM: Windows XP SP3, 2GB RAM, Parallels build 5608