The Letterville BullBoard: Memory???????

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Posted by Troy Haas (Member # 472) on :

How cann I "assign" more memory to my graphics programs????

I have 192mb and most times this is not a problem, but sometimes I get an error message telling me "memory is getting low"
I have shut off as much as possible running in the background.

Thanks in advance

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Troy Haas
"Metal_Leg" on mIRC

SAM Signs
"At old Hose House No. 8"
931 W. Columbia street
Evansville,Indiana 47710
812-437-5367
Home of the:
"Brush Fire at the Hose House" Letterhead Meet
April 27-29th,2001

"Chaos, panic, disorder - my work here is done."

Posted by Tony McDonald (Member # 1158) on :

Not sure Troy. I use Flexi and often it runs out of memory. As far as I know there isn't any way to give it more and I have 256 megs. I have to save the work and sometimes quit and go back in to get it back. Flexi saves a lot of undo levels. For a long time I would move things around on the screen with the arrow buttons, but it's saving each one of those movements as an undo. Now I select it and move it as close as possible in one movement and then adjust accordingly. This helps a lot with the "out of memory" messages.

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When good things happen...that must be a sign!!
Ace Graphics & Printing
P.O. Box 91
Camdenton, MO. USA
(573) 346-6696
<daddyo@advertisnet.com>

Posted by Don Coplen (Member # 127) on :

Troy, on a Macintosh, you just control + click on the program icon and select "get info". In the resulting pop up window, just type in the amount of ram you wish to allot to the program.

I don't know if any of that translates to windows, but often stuff I can do on my puter has corresponding features in windows.

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Don Coplen
aka "SaintPete"
Coplen Designs
St.Petersburg,
FL
dcoplen@mindspring.com

Co-Conspirator (with Bill
Modzel and Dave Sherby)
of the unofficial Letterville
Adobe Illustrator
Support Group &
coffee house.

If any Letterville Adobe
Illustrator users need any
help, feel free to
email any of the three
of us and we will help
out as best we can.

Posted by Mike Pipes (Member # 1573) on :

Troy,

If you are using Adobe Illustrator, PhotoShop, or CorelDRAW you are in luck.

In Adobe Illustrator and PhotoShop, go to FILE>Preferences> Units&Undo

There you can set the number of Undo levels to a smaller number which will reduce the RAM it sucks up.
Then in that same Preferences menu you will also see "PLugIns& Scratch Disk". Set the scratch disk to the largest drive in the system. The scratch disk is where the program will take data in memory and temporarily store it on the hard drive while it gets more data to hold in memory, making things run a little smoother.
PhotoShop also has a setting for the percentage of memory you want to allocate to it. I have mine set to 50% just so photoshop doesnt suck up all the RAM and keep me from opening another program at the same time.

In CorelDRAW, go to TOOLS>Options then in the GENERAL tab you can lower the Undo levels, in the MEMORY tab you can allocate a percentage of RAM plus edit the scratch disks.

If you arent using Adobe programs or CorelDRAW, I cant help ya but you might find similar items in your software.

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Mike Pipes
Digital Illusion Custom Graphics
Lake Havasu City, AZ
http://www.stickerpimp.com

Posted by Glenn Taylor (Member # 162) on :

Of course, you can always just buy more ram.

TigerDirect - PC100/128meg ram chip > $25
PC133/256meg ram chip > $50

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Warning: A well designed sign may cause fatigue due to increased business.
http://members.tripod.com/taylor_graphics
walldog@nc.rr.com

Posted by Aladd (Member # 1996) on :

Tony looks just like my brother in law,they could certainly pass for brothers,What do you think?

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Alan Ladd
Atlanta,Ga

Posted by Mark Smith (Member # 298) on :

I use a programming tool called CodeRush that requires a TON of horsepower (memory and resources) and it crashed my computer all the time for a while; then I upgrade to Windows 2000 professional and have had _zero_ problems since. I don't completely understand the architecture differences but the bottom line in win2k is that "system resources" are no longer an issue at all, they don't even exist. It's just a huge ocean of memory for your software to work with.

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Mark Smith
Ampersand Signs & Design
EstiMate Sign Estimating Software
www.ampweb.com/estimate
1-888-304-3300
Hailing from beautiful Asheville, N.C.

Posted by Dave Grundy (Member # 103) on :

Mark...I have had Win 2000 for about 2 weeks now...Initially just did an "upgrade" over top of Win 98SE. There was an improvement. But yesterday I reformatted, partitioned, set NTFS with allocation units set at 4096. Today it FLIES!

I have a specific Corel file that used to take 5-7 seconds to save on Win 98SE. On Win 2000 it happens so fast that I can't see it happening.

Same computer, same RAM, same programs loaded, same background programs running. I am totally impressed with Win 2000! Now that I have figured out where they hid/moved certain functions and how the networking stuff has changed (for the better)

The only thing I would say is that if anyone is considering the switch-over, do your homework and check that the manufacturers of your periferals have downloadable drivers for Win 2000.

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Dave Grundy
AKA "applicator" on mIRC
"stickin' sticky stuff to valuable vessels and vehicles!"
in Granton, Ontario, Canada
1-519-225-2634
dave.grundy@quadro.net
www.quadro.net/~shirley

Posted by VICTORGEORGIOU (Member # 474) on :

There's a show on the TechTV channel called Screen Savers. The experts there say that Windows 98 does not effectively use anything over something like 168K, but that Photoshop will use all the memory you install.

I've got 300+k on one computer and it runs out of memory just like all the others.

Not enough experience with 2000 to comment one way or another. Vic G

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Victor Georgiou
AnchorBlanks.com
http://albums.photopoint.com/j/AlbumList?u=1520990
Clipart CD's & FONTS
Designer Sign Blanks

Posted by old paint (Member # 549) on :

ok try this...go to START,SETTINGS, CONTROL PANEL,open system....open performance at the bottom you see file system, change from desktop to network server..will give more speed....graphics.....check to see if it set at full, and vitural memory...ok...now you need to play with this one...its set for automatic....now you can set it manually..in the minimum slot you need to take at least half your hard drive size to start...and see if it makes a diff....then bump it up if you still have problem..if it dont help then go back to letting windows set these values..now this is on 98a..98se....tends to hog more memeory and so does ME......this is one of the things that NT or win 2000 does better....but it will work in 98 if you set it up right.

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joe pribish-A SIGN MINT
2811 longleaf Dr.
pensacola, fl 32526
850-944-5060
BEWARE THE TRUTH.....YOU MAY NOT LIKE WHAT YOU FIND

Posted by Shane French (Member # 2098) on :

Joe, what are you smokin?

Everybody with win95/98/ME, don't set the virtual memory size to 'half your hard-disk.' This is a very BAD thing. The trick that Joe is talking about can help if you set the size to 2 or 3 times your physical memory size (so if you've got 64 megs you could set it to 128 or 192). What this does is keeps windows from constantly resizing your virtual memory file (aka swap-file); in reality, though, it doesn't provide much of a speed boost at all. If you set it to half of your hard disk size, you will have a file on your machine that is half the size of your hard disk (this would be a BAD thing).

Joe, you kill me man!

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Halo Graphics
Clearlake Oaks, CA
http://www.halographics.com
ntshane@halographics.com

Posted by old paint (Member # 549) on :

did i not say..."you need to play with this"..was nothing more then a starting point....if you have a 2 gig h/d...you start at 1000 megs....to see if it WILL improve any of the out of memory problems...then you can reduce it from there..till you start to incounter out of memory problems again...thats all i was sayin.....on this hard drive a 30 gig, windows is using 25,347 megs as a swap file....its in auto mode...but i dont any out of memory problems..

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joe pribish-A SIGN MINT
2811 longleaf Dr.
pensacola, fl 32526
850-944-5060
BEWARE THE TRUTH.....YOU MAY NOT LIKE WHAT YOU FIND

Posted by Mike Pipes (Member # 1573) on :

My Windows swap file is 0 MB.. I have it disabled.

After years and years of playing with settings, I've discovered my machine runs more smoothly with the swapfile disabled and relying completely upon the memory to do the task.

Since good graphics programs utilize their own scratch disks/swapfiles anyway, what's the point in making them compete with Windows for space?

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Mike Pipes
Digital Illusion Custom Graphics
Lake Havasu City, AZ
http://www.stickerpimp.com

Posted by Shane French (Member # 2098) on :

Joe, would you stop making me laugh so hard!??! I'm liable to pee my pants!

The reason your swapfile says 25,000 or so megs is because that is the size AVAILABLE for swap...let me guess, you have used about 5 gigs of that 30 gig drive? In any event, Windows has that much space available to use for virtual memory. That is not the actual size of your swap file. If you set the size of your swap file to 25 Gigs, then you are keeping the size static, that is, it can't change dynamically.

So there it will sit, a 25,000 megabyte file on your hard disk.....doing nothing. I'm sure that you realize that virtual memory...er...sucks. That's probably why Mike disabled his.

Joe, perhaps you should switch to a more reliable OS like windows 2000. (sorry, couldn't resist )

Joe, if you're going to write such good material, you could at least preface your posts with, "Caution, readers may lose bladder control." (Hope you don't take offense to any of this, Joe, 99% enjoying getting a few good digs in on ya, 1% serious.)

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Halo Graphics
Clearlake Oaks, CA
http://www.halographics.com
ntshane@halographics.com

Posted by old paint (Member # 549) on :

good luck with win 2000.....i really figured you as a mac owner.....

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joe pribish-A SIGN MINT
2811 longleaf Dr.
pensacola, fl 32526
850-944-5060
BEWARE THE TRUTH.....YOU MAY NOT LIKE WHAT YOU FIND

Posted by Shane French (Member # 2098) on :

OUCH! Dang you really do hate me.

-shane

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Halo Graphics
Clearlake Oaks, CA
http://www.halographics.com
ntshane@halographics.com

Posted by old paint (Member # 549) on :

now you really makin me laugh.....

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joe pribish-A SIGN MINT
2811 longleaf Dr.
pensacola, fl 32526
850-944-5060
BEWARE THE TRUTH.....YOU MAY NOT LIKE WHAT YOU FIND

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