How heavyweight is CS5.5?

[dodgem]

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??

 

[dodgem]

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.