How to speed things up....

[Flat Stanley]

Working letter size, with 4 layers at 300dpi is quite slow for me. I have a recent dual core processor with one GB of ram.

Are there any recommended ways of speeding things up? For instance, can you increase the amount of hard drive space available to paint.net? Or are there some options which need turning on or off??

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Kind Regards // Stanley

[Bob]

Reduce dpi. (3000 x 8000 px size, am I right?)

Buy branded hardware (Ram is your case). not no name stuff. I mean with good bus and such.

Buy a Quad-Core. (Duo Core Quad or whatever's its name, it's the last Intel chip) or wait for the eight one.

It helps A LOT: http://blogs.msdn.com/rickbrew/archive/ ... cores.aspx

I think hard drive does not really affect here, apart for load/save and maybe history (take care to format it in NTFS)

That's not really PdN specific hints, it just basic h/w updating.

Also, it depends on what tasks you achieve with your pictures, if it's adding lot of effects, or painting or idk else.

As always, I might be totally wrong.

[usedHONDA]

Ctrl+Alt+Delete>Process tab>CPU usage>End the process taking up the greatest amount of CPU (Internet Explorer normality takes up lots of CPU for me).

EDIT: Oh, and this would help.

[Myrddin]

This may not have the intended result but would this work?:

http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/4100/untitledrz6.jpg

Read about it somewhere, could have even been on here but I've slept since then, if I'm wrong sorry.

[Rick Brewster]

Switching PaintDotNet.exe to high priority is probably a bad idea.

Really, if you want great performance, here's the things you do or want:

1) Have lots of memory. 256MB is the minimum but you really want 1 or 2 GB if you're working with large images. Less memory means more hard drive use which is extremely slow.

2) Have a dual-core processor. Paint.NET is heavily optimized for multicore systems.

3) Use 64-bit Windows. More RAM and better performance.

[Myrddin]

Could I ask then Rick, why is setting PDN.exe to high priority a bad idea?

[Illnab1024]

If it overtakes a system process on a critical function, there could be some malicious ramifications, I guess...

[usedHONDA]

ramifications

Main Entry: ram·i·fi·ca·tion

Pronunciation: "ra-m&-f&-'kA-sh&n

Function: noun

1 a : BRANCH, OFFSHOOT b : a branched structure

2 a : the act or process of branching b : arrangement of branches (as on a plant)

3 : CONSEQUENCE, OUTGROWTH

Anyway, yeah, don't change the priority. I've done it. If you put it high, the computer crashes for 10 minutes and if you make it lower, it just goes slow.

[Flat Stanley]

thanks for all the advice guys.

From the nature of your replies, it seems that this kind of slow down is not a common problem. I will take the offending file home and try it on my desktop. Its an athlon 64 with 1gb of OCZ ram. I'll let you know what happens.....

Thanks again

//stanley

[usedHONDA]

Try restarting the computer (or hibernating). That will make it feel good, which will thus make you feel good.

[The_Lionhearted]

Try restarting the computer (or hibernating). That will defragment the system and make it feel good, which will thus make you feel good.

...? Restarting a computer doesn't defragment it... :?

[usedHONDA]

Well there was some other word like defragment that's supposed to describe it.

[The_Lionhearted]

Restart? Refresh? Renew?

Sounds like a deodorant commercial.

[Rick Brewster]

Could I ask then Rick, why is setting PDN.exe to high priority a bad idea?

I'm guessing it's a single core/processor system (just playing the statistics here -- most people don't have brand new computers). If Paint.NET starts running away with high CPU usage, it will make the rest of the system unusable because you said you want Paint.NET to have priority.

In my experience and opinion, there's really only two times to muck with the priorities:

1) You have something that uses a lot of CPU and you want it to run in the background, effectively only using spare CPU cycles that nobody else is using. An example would be if you are doing a large compression job and you want to keep going about doing some other stuff. Having a dual- or quad-core system is actually making this less of an issue. If I have some large compression job going on the side (e.g. I'm making a ZIP file of the Paint.NET CVS server so I can do a backup), and if I had a quad-core system ... then I've still got 3 cores leftover that can do stuff at full speed.

2) You have a real-time application (e.g., MP3 player) that seems to be misbehaving by way of skipping audio or something, and you notice weird CPU usage patterns surround it. Sometimes setting these to a higher priority can alleviate that. When the real-time app needs CPU time, then by golly it is going to get it. But by the nature of the application it isn't going to be using a constant amount of CPU time -- maybe 100ms every 2 seconds or something.

The foreground application automatically receives a priority boost anyway. I can almost guarantee that the computer is going to do a better job of managing thread scheduling than you can.

[Myrddin]

Thanks for that, luckily though it was only PDN that I set to high so hope nothing too serious will come of it.