[JmanA9]

Has anyone run photoshop on a computer with these (or lower) specs?

Pentium 3 450 MHZ Processor
224 MB of SDRAM
18 Gigs of free HD Space
4 Meg ATI Video Card
Windows 98

[jakoval]

I tried running PS 7 on a pII-400 256MB 6GB machine running Win2K. It wasn't happy.

On the other hand the Limited Edition of Photoshop which came with my camera (I believe it's a stripped-down version of PS 5) runs just fine on that machine (as long as I don't have half a dozen images open at the same time, along with Outlook, a couple of browsers and an Access database)

Even the 1.2 gig Athlon machine I currently have PS7 installed on was much happier with 512 MB than the original 256.

howdy

well I have it running on a PII- 400 Celeron 192 RAM...As jakoval said it's not real happy but does run for me with no lockups as long as I don't do anything to bizzare

buck

[JmanA9]

Does it work well enough to get something done?

[slipe]

Yes it works fine. If you use small image files it isn’t bad, but if you use large files like the 15Mb that come from a 5Mp camera you will find it takes a while to run the filters. I have used Photoshop for years and only recently got a really fast computer. I’ve used it with 166, 400 and 600 Mhz Pentiums. Faster is nice but people have been getting by for years with slower computers.

[jakoval]

To expand on my earlier post.

It depends to a large degree on which version of PS you'd be running and what you want to do with the program. As the saying goes, YMMV. For my purposes (and I don't deal with images as large as slipe does) I found it unacceptably slow.

If you're working with smaller images or doing only minor modifications to them then you might find it works fine for you.
On the other hand, if that's all you're doing then you may find that Photoshop is overkill and a different app might better serve your needs.

[slipe]

I guess it comes down to what you consider unacceptable. I ran PS7 on a 600Mhz PII for a while – and the MB was limited to PC100 RAM. I not only worked with 15Mb files from my camera but with 32Mb files from my film scanner. Things didn’t work real fast but I got by. Most people don’t work with files that large and I would think working with a normal sized file with a 450 would be faster than working with enormous files with the 600.

I’ve run PS 3, 4, 5.5 and 7. I don’t think the version has much to do with the speed on a specific processor. A certain filter takes so long to run on a given processor regardless of version.

Photoshop likes RAM, but if you shut everything else down before opening Photoshop and set the percent of available RAM PS is allowed to take up to about 80% you can get by with 256Mb on relatively large images. You want to keep the history at 20 and not have any more images than necessary for a particular job open.

I had PS 5.5 on my 400 Pentium with only 256Mb RAM for a while and could work with my 32Mb scanned images without writing to the HD if I kept the brush sizes small. I don’t just do simple things. I went to 512 fairly quickly though.

Faster is certainly better, but I personally think you can get by with what you have. I would probably find my old computer unacceptable after using my new one, but it didn’t seem that bad when it was all I had.

[SkyBlueKid]

I have been running Photoshop 5.5 on a 233Mhz PC with 32MB RAM. I can say it ran but it was very limited in its performance. Needless to say I have upgraded the hardware recently. I work as a graphic designer and generally find image manipulation is a very memory hungry operation you may get better performance by boosting your RAM.

But the answer your seeking is YES.