One of the most frustrating things for any computer user is having to wait. This frustration only increases when the thing you’re waiting on shouldn’t have any wait associated with it to begin with. Photoshop, for many, is one of the most demanding applications on the computer. Capable of bringing the most powerful of computers to their knees, waiting is one thing many associate with it. There are however, a few tips and tricks that you can implement to speed up the monster application.

Unplug the Plugins - The first thing you should realize is that Photoshop itself is a relatively small program. It takes up, in it’s simplest form, little more space then does Adobe reader. The simplest form however, is not how this program installs and runs. Instead, opening up Photoshop opens along with it an entire library of plugins, frameworks, and supporting macros. If you pay close attention while the splash screen (the “Photoshop” screen that appears at program startup) you will actually be able to see all of the various items loading.

Although scattered in a million different places, the general category of Plugins constitutes the bulk of the Photoshop program. Everything from filters, to various effects, automatons, 3D engines, are all considered Plugins to Photoshop. Removing the Plugins you don’t actively use, you can take Photoshop from 0 to 60 in no time flat. I have installments of Photoshop, that due to their sheer lack of Plugins, will load in under 1 second.

Plugins are managed on a Mac by going into the Applications -> Adobe Photoshop -> Plug-ins. By simply deleting or moving a Plugin out of this general “Plug-ins” folder, Photoshop will not load it at boot, giving it one less thing to do. I recommend using Photoshop for a month or so, writing down all of the Plugins you have used or think you may use very soon. The ones that aren’t written down, don’t delete, but simply move to a separate folder, so that they aren’t loaded, but aren’t deleted in the event you need them at some point.

Fonts – The Silent Killer - One of the biggest slowdowns for any application and the computer in general, not just Photoshop, is fonts. Yes, those small cute looking files buried deep in your computer can actually act like a parasite, sucking the life out of programs. Due to the way fonts work, a computer is forced to load all known fonts at the time the program is initialized. By removing or suspending fonts you do not use or have no application for, you reduce the number of fonts that are loaded at opening, and therefor reduce the amount of time it takes to open the program and even boot your computer. Removing fonts also helps keep RAM sizes down, as less information is needed to smoothly run the program. Fonts can also cause serious serious stability issues, as most programs are unable to cope with a corrupt font file, and will usually crash upon encountering one. It is a good idea to often run checks on your font library, to insure there are no errors.

Maintenance can be done on a Mac by going into the Font Book in the Utilities folder, while on a Windows XP machine by going into the Fonts folder. Various programs exist for Windows to help facilitate maintenance in a more user friendly and advanced way.

Itchy? Then Scratch - Because computers often can only accommodate a few gigabytes of RAM at a time (unless you have a server or a supercomputer), a need existed to deal with the problem of how to handle data once the RAM filled up. The scratch disk was the solution to this problem. Simply stated, a scratch disk is a disk, or part of a disk, used as RAM for when the RAM becomes full. Every computer, regardless of whether you have one or 500 drives, or even know what a drive is, has a scratch disk. On most systems, the scratch disk will be a dynamically controlled section of your hard drive that is controlled by the operating system.

If you only have one disk, then this may not be possible right now, but something to think about for the near future, however, if you do have more then one drive, you’re in luck. Because all drives have a certain bandwidth (most drives have a max read / write of <100mb/sec)> Performance, and check the box of the drive you which to be used as a scratch disk, setting the amount of space you which Photoshop to have control over.