Photoshop CS3 and Parallels

chrisk76

Junior Member
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.
 
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.
 
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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.
 
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
 
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