Ask-a-Nerd - Photoshop, nVidia and Windows

[amused]

I have a paid license of Adobe CS5.5 that includes Photoshop 5.1. It's loaded on a 4 month old Dell XPS notebook running Windows 7 with 8MB RAM and a Core i5 processor.

Photoshop ran fine for a few weeks after installation, then suddenly kept crashing immediately upon opening, and was shut down by Windows. I found the menu where I could set Photoshop to run in compatibility mode with Windows 7. That fixed it for about 6 weeks. Then it started to freeze after any operation and had to be shut down from the Task Manager. I went online and found that the video card driver might be an issue. I remembered that there was a menu where I could set the graphics processing to either the video card or the onboard video processing. It was then set to the card, so I switched it to onboard. Now Photoshop runs fine.

What happened? It seems possible that either Windows, nVidia, or Adobe automatically installed an update along the way that borked things. But I don't know how to find out.

[rasetsu]

I don't run windows 7, but it seems unlikely to me that a Windows update would have caused it. I presume you have relatively more explicit control over updates to photoshop such that if it occurred following one of those, you might have already connected up the dots. It's also possible that you installed some software or driver which itself changed the behavior of one of these; most likely the graphics drivers. If you've been installing other graphics oriented programs, specifically ones having to do with video, that's a possibility. You'd have to check at NVidia, but they typically have several different previous versions of their drivers available, as do manufacturers whose cards are based on NVidia designs — and if you're running generic NVidia drivers on a card which differs from the reference design (or NVidia's in-house target), that itself can introduce compatibilities.

You could go back and try previous versions of the graphics driver to see if any are not affected by the issue, but my question would be, why bother? Moreover, if the cause was some other software, that may give a false positive.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I have a paid license of Adobe CS5.5 that includes Photoshop 5.1. It's loaded on a 4 month old Dell XPS notebook running Windows 7 with 8MB RAM and a Core i5 processor.

Photoshop ran fine for a few weeks after installation, then suddenly kept crashing immediately upon opening, and was shut down by Windows. I found the menu where I could set Photoshop to run in compatibility mode with Windows 7. That fixed it for about 6 weeks. Then it started to freeze after any operation and had to be shut down from the Task Manager. I went online and found that the video card driver might be an issue. I remembered that there was a menu where I could set the graphics processing to either the video card or the onboard video processing. It was then set to the card, so I switched it to onboard. Now Photoshop runs fine.

What happened? It seems possible that either Windows, nVidia, or Adobe automatically installed an update along the way that borked things. But I don't know how to find out.

Check the "about" information in the Help option for each program and see if that's been updated recently.

You can also use restore to got to an earlier update of Windows to see that's the problem.

[amused]

Thanks rasetsu, that does actually help.

I installed Particle Illusions and Scrivenor in the middle of all this. Particle Illusions is heavily graphics intensive and may have made some changes during installation. I doubt Scrivenor would need to do so. I'm not sure, but I think Adobe is doing updates in the background, I'll poke around. A few years back I worked with Video Toaster and LightWave 3D animation. There were constant issues with the video drivers, so I'm familiar with the issue. Right now I just don't want to spend the time on it. I need my laptop while I'm in job search mode, but once past that I think I'll find a computer shop that is familiar with the Adobe programs and get them to check the drivers for all the software that I run.