How heavyweight is CS5.5?

dodgem · 8 Nov 2012 at 22:45

I bought a MBP for my gf recently since she's doing an interior design course. That and she has been saying she wants a mac for aaaaaaaaages! Anyway, seems pretty nippy and nice to use in general... until....

I installed CS5.5 - and so far just using Illustrator and Photoshop, it seems to have massively slowed the machine down. Is that normal, or is there something odd going on? Perhaps it's just not up to the job.... it's a 2010 15" MBP - Core i5 @ 2.53GHz and 4GB ram.

Should she actually be using a more hardcore/newer mac for that kind of work, or an older version of Creative Suite, or what??

slinxy · 9 Nov 2012 at 06:56

Adobe programs are heavyweight.. a lot of it depends on the image/s that your editing. Resolution and layers has a massive effect of the performance of the machine but it should be fine with the spec of your machine.

I hate adobe with a passion at the moment, having just pushed C6 master collection to all the macs at work, that said it may not be the adobe software that's doing it. keep an eye out on what memory is being used up in activity monitor; memory is dirt cheap and that will always speed up a mac.

uniQ · 9 Nov 2012 at 08:11

CS5 & Photoshop love RAM. An upgrade would make a noticeable difference to it's performance.

Tunney · 9 Nov 2012 at 08:13

My machine struggled with CS6 on 4GB RAM. RAM is cheap and easy to install. Buy as much as your machine will support!

And SSD drive will also help but that's a more expensive fix.

GTRacer · 9 Nov 2012 at 08:22

More RAM definitely helps, but I put together newspapers on CS5.5 on 4GB iMacs that often have InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and Final Cut (the macs are shared between student media outlets) running and I haven't found it massively slow. It definitely isn't fast though.

Although light work in PS and Ai shouldn't have that much of an effect on such a recent machine.

dodgem · 10 Nov 2012 at 19:04

Cheers guys. I think the max this mbp will take is 8GB, and as you say, RAM is cheap so i'll upgrade that and see how it goes. Got to say that i was surprised at how much it slowed down! Would it make a difference that all the images in Illustrator were embedded rather than linked (and had 7 illustrator files open at once)?

We were using Scribus on my Linux desktop before, and linking images meant that if you moved the Scribus file then all the links were broken since they were relative links rather than absolute, hence using embedded images.