Regina wrote:
>I am a hobby photographer and my picture files average around 28 
>mbs.  Normally the computer has no problem dealing with 2-3 of them being 
>opened and working on them.  This evening I only had photoshop and 1 
>picture that I was working on and the screen started 'whiteing' out except 
>for the task bar and the top bar of photoshop and the system slowed to a 
>crawl. >>


I doubt it's a hard drive problem. Sounds more like memory lockup.

A 28Mb photo is huge, and editing a photo that size is probably swamping 
your system, leaving very little margin for error.

Applications running in the background, or invisible processes like 
trojans, viruses, etc would be enough to cause memory freeze.

Check Task Manager to ensure there are no unnecessary applications running 
in the background.

Run a full system scan with a good antispyware program such as Malwarebytes 
or Superantispyware (both free). Also run an antivirus scan.

Try reducing the size of your photos, either by compression or by dimension 
to a more manageable size. I'd regard anything over 500 Kb as too large 
unless you're intending to crop drastically (which will reduce the size 
anyway) or are intending to produce poster-size prints. Those photos are 
probably about 4 or 5 times larger than the size of your monitor screen.

If they happen to be .bmp photos (which tend to be very large in filesize), 
convert them to .jpg.  Converting to around 65-80% jpg compression should 
not result in any noticeable reduction in quality and should bring a .bmp 
down to about 1/20th its original filesize.

Don Penlington



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