Elizabeth May wrote:
Sometimes Photoshop will run slower if you have a lot of stuff open.  Mine tends to get pissy with me if I have AIM open.

I don't have any else open other than Firefox.

And this is pretty recent and it all come on pretty quickly.  I wonder what may have triggered it.

BatchFoto Photography wrote:
Boost the allocated ram?

I may have to.

But I'm wondering what the catalyst was for all of this.

A slice of oblivion wrote:
When was the last time you ran a defrag?

I haven't, been I need someone to walk me through it for a Mac.

From what I read in SF2, Macs defrag on their own, but I would suspect their is another way to do it, designed for a Mac, but I don't know what that way is.

A slice of oblivion wrote:
When was the last time you ran a defrag?

Its a Mac, should be constantly running.

PYPI FASHION wrote:
Make sure you don't have a offline network printer that is defined as the default printer.

I had one defined and my PS would lag whenever I was not connected to that network.

It's not set to any printers, at least from what I can tell.

BatchFoto Photography wrote:

Its a Mac, should be constantly running.

Macs only defrag files smaller than 20megs, unless they fixed it in a recent update.
I used to work at a dvd authoring company, man defragging was a bitch. It would sometimes still be running after a weekend.

Laura Ann Photography wrote:

I haven't, been I need someone to walk me through it for a Mac.

From what I read in SF2, Macs defrag on their own, but I would suspect their is another way to do it, designed for a Mac, but I don't know what that way is.

You don't need to.

Laura, PM me for help. I used to work for Apple as a Mac Genius and can probably help you troubleshoot this.

Laura Ann Photography wrote:
I'm hoping to trouble shoot a little here.

My photoshop is running slowly, and now it seems that my burner isn't working either.  I'm working on figuring out the CD burner, but in the case that they are linked, does any have any ideas what may be causing this?

I don't think I've done any updates recently, except maybe Firefox which happens periodically.

I'm using a Macbook Pro, and running OSX whatever version, but the laptop was bought in early 2008.

If you have any suggestions for me, or any ideas what may be causing this, please let me know.  I do all of my retouching on this laptop, and the sooner I get this figured out, the better.

Can you define "running slowly?" Do you get spinning beachballs or things just seem to take a long time? Which things ... batch operations/actions or applying filters and adustments? How big's your disk and how full is it? Full disks cause trouble. How much RAM do you have and are you paging? Paging can be detected via the "top" program in Terminal or via GUI apps such as Memory Stick.

Unlikely your performance issues are related to your DVD drive but what symptoms are you having with it?

Also helpful to specify the exact MBP model and the exact version of the OS.

M_M_P wrote:
It does sound like a memory issue, but it could be that it's a hardware issue rather than a software issue. Macs are great, but they still break from time to time. Perhaps it's still under warranty?

I think it is.

If I can't troubleshoot this, I'll be taking it in.  But I'm hoping to resolve this myself if at all possible.