Paint.net runs too slow

[cheesenachos]

All,

I'm new to paint.net and hope to use it to add "professional" edits to my personal photos. That being said, it seems to run quite slow when:

1 - rendering (after a change like saturation, hue, or magic wand is used)

2 - adding/removing layers....undoing/redoing changes

3 - also changing the opacity of a layer really seems to drag on my pc

does anyone have any reasonable solutions? or is this sort of standard? personally i would expect a bit of slowdown, but not to the point of which i am experiencing

for the record, my PC is a HP laptop with Windows Vista. I have 2GBs of RAM and am running low on hard drive space. I am thinking about using ReadyBoost to add extra memory. Any thoughts or fixes to improve performance?

Oh, lastly, my photos were taken on my 15MP Canon dSLR. The file sizes are running about 4-5MBs on my hard drive.

Thank for the help.

[BoltBait]

Here are some ideas to increase the speed of Paint.NET:

- Add more memory to your system

This will allow you to open larger images with more layers and keep your system from paging (swapping out to disk) so much.

- Add more hard drive space

Hard drive space is important because of the undo history and of course, for storing more pictures. Also, if your system is low on hard drive space, your hard drive is probably badly fragmented. So...

- Defrag your hard drive

http://kessels.com/jkdefrag/ has a free one that I really like.

- Switch to an SSD

I'm running a Solid State Drive in my laptop now and I can tell you that it is amazing! Fast. And. Quiet. If you are going to upgrade your hard drive anyway, you might as well go solid.

- Upgrade your OS to Window 7 (64 bit)

Going from 32 to 64 bits gives a noticable performance improvement. Your system may not support 64 bit, so check before investing in a new OS. If your system doesn't support 64 bit, its time to buy a new system. I highly recommend an Intel Core2 Quad processor or the newer i3, i5, and i7 processors.

Hope this helps!

[Ego Eram Reputo]

Lage files tend to balloon the memory requirements, so BoltBait's first suggestion is quite correct. You can read more about the sort of sizes involved in this thread: Out of memory to load/edit an image? Read this first! .

As you know your HD is running out of space, this is probably what you should attend to first. I'd forgo ReadyBoost and just add a 1tb drive (external even). They are dirt cheap at the moment.

[Rick Brewster]

15 MP = slow. Simple as that.