[Sue C]

I have a Dell computer and run Windows XP. I downloaded some pictures from my Olympus digital camera just now, but I can't open them. I can open pictures that were previously downloaded and worked on in Adobe Photo Deluxe.

The error message I am receiving when I try to open a photo says:

"Cannot open pxxxxxx.jpg because the primary scratch disk is full. We suggest that you free some space on your scratch drive before continuing."

I deleted a bunch of photos that were in folders in my Adobe Photo Deluxe. I restarted my computer. I did an "analyze" of disk defragmentation and the computer indicated it was not necessary, so I did not do a defragment.

Please help. Thanks,
Sue

[fairnooks]

Do you have more than one drive or a roomier partition on the same drive or possibly a external SATA connected drive?

For each image you open and work on Adobe needs "working" room to keep not only the original picture temporarilly stored but a copy of each change you make so that you can undo all the changes at any time if you wish. Its this working room or scratch disk room that Adobe is complaining about and the easiest solution is to move those scratch disks areas to another drive or to a lesser extent, at least to a different partition with a lot of room.

If such an option is unavailible to you its drive cleaning time--you have to delete and shrink enough things on the hard drive to have enough room for the scratch disk area. Delete unused programs and files, shrink the restore point disk reserve size, shrink the recycle bin, delete all temp files, etc.

Ususally the place in Adobe products for changing the scratch disk location is under Edit/Preferences>Scratch Disks.

If the drive you are using indicates there is more than 15-20 gigs still availible then it might be a program glitch instead because that should be enough room for everything to coexist. Relocating the scratch disks may solve that problem as well.

[SB305]

I'm amazed you have Adobe P D Home working on XP at all. Always thought the two were incompatible, which is why I never put it on any of my XP rigs after a less-than-satisfactory first try.
Anyway, the setting fairnooks refers to is under Preferences>Memory Preferences on 3.1.

[Sue C]

I don't believe I installed Adobe Photo Deluxe 3.0 on my Dell. As far as I can remember, it came already installed on it.

Anyway, I tried to open a photo this morning and it would not open. I restarted my computer and it did open a photo. The program used to work just fine. But lately, it starts up very slowly and operates slowly. And then it was just yesterday where it would not open a downloaded photo at all.

In answer to questions:

Do you have more than one drive or a roomier partition on the same drive or possibly a external SATA connected drive?
I have no idea. I am not computer literate.

If such an option is unavailible to you its drive cleaning time--you have to delete and shrink enough things on the hard drive to have enough room for the scratch disk area. Delete unused programs and files, shrink the restore point disk reserve size, shrink the recycle bin, delete all temp files, etc.

I'm not sure what programs and files can be deleted. I emptied the recycle bin. I ran a disk clean-up and disk defragmentation. I have no idea what you mean by "shrink the restore point desk reserve size".

Relocating the scratch disks may solve that problem as well.

I don't know what this means.

Maybe the following will help one of you to help me. Here are my settings:

Memory preference:
Primary: start up (only choices are "start up" or "C")
Secondary: C:\ (only choices are "C" or "none")
Physical Memory Usage Available RAM 473001 K
used by Photo Deluxe 75%
Photo Deluxe RAM 354750 K
Plug in's: driver C

Items with "check mark's":
show assistant drawer
export clipboard
allow seasonal connectables

Also, when I looked at My Computer, it showed that the Local Disk C has free space of 56GB and a total size of 70.4GB.

Thanks for any further help,
Sue

[SB305]

Well, with available RAM of 473MB when the program was written for PC's which often had 32MB or less, there OUGHT not to be a problem there. Similarly with the massive 56GB you have free on C: for use as a scratch disk.
You'll find the Help section in the program fully explains how to change the preference settings. Interestingly, it states that "Used by PD" should be no more than 65% on Windows NT. Yours is set at 75% on XP (as mine is on 98SE for which it's the recommended maximum) .
My Primary is set at "start up" and Secondary at "none" and that works perfectly on 98SE with only a C: hard drive installed (free hard drive space about 39GB and free RAM about 750MB).
I'm sure the original test for Adobe PD Home declared the program incompatible with XP so it's surprising that you've had it working without problems for some time. In those circumstances, I'd suspect that it's become corrupted and needs to be reinstalled.
On further thought, 70GB is an unusual size for a hard drive and your drive may be split into partitions. If your Primary in Adobe is set to "start up", try changing it to C:

[fairnooks]

Indeed it seems you have plenty of room for your scratch disks but its an old program so it mght not be very dynamic in the way it "sees" space available or the program is corrupt somewhere and needs to be reinstalled.

I would defrag the hard drive and reboot even though your analyzer said it was not needed, just to make sure that the pagefile isn't hung up somewhere repeatedly where it gets fragmented easily.

Disregaurd what I wrote previously as that was based on not having enough room for the scratch disks but if there is a reset to default choice availible in the scratch disks preferences go ahead and reset.