Photoshop needs LESS Memory
Lately I’ve been running into an issue with Adobe Photoshop giving me an error that it has run out of memory (RAM) and can’t complete the process.
To combat this I made sure that Photoshop was set to use 100% of memory available and it was. Now I started thinking that maybe 3 gigs wasn’t enough memory. Wait, that can’t be right. I started to think something else was wrong, there is no way my process on five 5 MB pictures should eat up 1.5 gigs of memory that PS says it was available to use.
After searching around, I read some suggestions to try reducing the amount of memory you give Photoshop. What? I changed it to 50%, and viola, it worked!
It turns out many of the components of Photoshop, such as Photomerge and Merge to HDR, don’t use the memory that you allocated to Photoshop, but grab their own. This means when you tell Photoshop to take 100%, it takes about 50% of your memory, then between other apps, your OS and other misc. processes you run out of memory for these tools to use.
The lesson of the day is don’t give Photoshop too much memory unless you run into issues. You most likely will be better off giving it less as long as you have a good amount of memory.
Facsimile is Retiring
This is the year the fax machine needs to retire. Not just the machine, which I haven’t used for awhile now in favor of an Internet faxing service, the whole idea of sending documents over a phone line.
The fax changed the way many companies did business. No longer did you need to mail official documents and wait days for them to arrive. Now you could send them instantly with a press of a button.
The Internet has replaced any need for a fax. I know what you are thinking, “But Chris, what about signed documents?” A fax machine is just a scanner that sends the documents over the phone line. Nothing is stopping anyone from scanning to a computer and emailing it instead.
So if you work one of those companies that are still living by a fax machine, please start accepting these documents by email. I would love to cancel my fax service by the end of the year so it can retire peacefully in Florida.