PSE - sudden slowdown

[Belis2mi]

I use PSE 15 with Windows 10 and have had almost no issues with it for 9 months now since purchasing. Over that time I have created roughly 200 layouts. Tonight I was working on a normal page with a kit and template, each of which I have used before with no issue. About half way through (pictures in, paper in, some word strips) the program slowed down to a snail's pace. It seemed like it was locked up it went so slow - over a minute to process changing the font size in a single word, over two minutes to save the file, won't scroll, etc.

I restarted the computer, installed updates and restarted again. The rest of the computer functions at normal speed but for some reason PSE is still in that slow mode.

Any ideas what this is or how to fix it?

Thanks in advance,

 

[GingerScraps]

First of all ... congrats on 200 layouts in 9 months!! That is amazing!

As far as your PSE issues, I'm not really going to be much help. I use CS on a pretty old Mac (about 7 years with is OLD in ten world, lol), I have had issues of my program slowing down and it is usually because I have it maxed out, so I close up other programs I have running in the background (iTunes, open internet windows, my backup system etc) that can sometimes resolve the problem. I have also come across issues with layer styles, actions or patterns I have installed- if they are huge they will make the program slow way down. I can install them and restart and I will be back to regular speed.

 

[BoomersGirl]

I had PSE 11 and purchased PSE 15. From the minute, I installed PSE 15, it ran at a snail's pace. I tried everything and couldn't get it running at a reasonable speed. My computer is not a brand new one - probably 4 or 5 years old, so I thought maybe that was the issue, but I'm not buying a new computer anytime soon. So back to PSE 11 I went - purchasing 15 was a waste of money for me.

 

[zanthia]

i use pse 10 on win 7 and htat happens sometimes too. i usully reboot and/or run ccleaner and that seems to help .

 

[ObiJanKenobi]

I find usually when software is unresponsive like that, my computer is doing something really hard-drive sucking in the background. There are hundreds of processes going on in the background all the time, but things like updates can sometimes cripple me right in the middle of something I think is important. And I'm a bad one for having lots of tabs open in Chrome, Family Tree Maker, Thunderbird, Deezer, and Windows Explorer open all at once. Windows 10 has a pop-up that warns there are programs running that are slowing down my computer, that can be shut down without affecting what I'm doing and I typically ignore it. One of these days I'm going to try it to see just what it does.

 

[Belis2mi]

Thanks for all the support - at least it appears I am not alone in this issue. For now what I ended up doing was just starting over fresh and even though my original layout still won't work right, I have been able to use PSE at relatively normal responsiveness for the past week. That being said, I haven't tried anything particularly complicated during that time. The background stuff is something I will watch out for more - I don't think things are running but sometimes you don't know what is really going on back there!

 

[Deanna]

I keep minimal things on the hard drive. I have a 1 tb capacity--but I move almost everything OFF the computer (kits, photos, layouts) every single month.) I find the more free space you have on your hard drive, the faster it moves!! On my older computer (windows 7) my hard drive wasn't nearly as large and it would slow down every week or so!! So, I'd move things OFF, and it was better. I'm REALLY enjoying the larger capacity hard drive!! I run with pse 15 and haven't had any issues at all-

 

[Janytime]

I have a whopping computer with 4 internal hard drives, including a small solid state hard drive that programs install to. The 3 internal drives used for files, graphics, etc. are 2T, 3T, and 4T in size. I also use two cloud backup services. Eventually things get moved to external drives also. With all that being said, in the PSE programs, make sure under your "Preferences" then under the "performance" tab to set your RAM allowance. I keep mine at around 70% of what I have available in the computer. Make sure your "scratch disc" has plenty of empty space. (If you have just one hard drive, that means keeping a good amount of it free, which means you move things to external drives as you can.) Two other things I stay aware of are what time my automatic defrag is working. I think when that is running it can slow down the PSE progress some. The other thing is my cloud backup service. When it is running in the background, my whole computer slows down some. I love my cloud backup service, so I simply disable it while I am working in PSE. Things run better then I notice. When I am done designing, it's no trouble to restart the backup service. Maybe these things can help a little.