Photoshop (CS5) is glitching, zoom breaks & elements wont delete

Question

Every time I install photoshop on my new computer it gets progressively worse with the glitches. The zoom will get stuck it will show the % on the layer going higher and lower however the document doesn't change. The marquee tool when I make a square / rectangle it will flash (or blink) and when I move it goes back in forth from the place I moved it from to the place I moved it to. And a few other annoying glitches, like when I open a file into photoshop the screen is just black.

I have tried uninstalling then cleaning registry and then using the adobe cleanup tool then reinstalling, no luck (I have done this a few times with the older versions I have to, this issue happens on ever version I have of photoshop (CS5, CS5.5 & CS6) and only on this new computer, my old computer with crappy specs never had these problems)

I would appreciate any help!

Answer 1

Some things to play with are:

• Size of the cache file (Preferences > Performance on a Mac, not sure on Windows)
• Location of the cache file. In a perfect world, you allocate your cache file to a partition that is used for nothing else. It is therefore never fragmented because it is deleted leaving nothing in the partition once Photoshop quits. You should use the fastest disk available for this.
• Amount of memory allocated to Photoshop. I generally allow Photoshop to use about 2/3 of the real memory in my computer (the amount of RAM available after the OS wires things down). Adobe provides a suggestion and it's normally right. But, tweaking it might give you some improvements.
• Graphics acceleration. If you are using a supported graphics card, the performance should be markedly better. However, you might try backing off to not using the graphics processor, then enabling it and playing with the options in the Advanced... dialog to see if you can hit of what the issue is.
• Cache levels -- if this is set too low, you may experience poor performance.
• History states -- if this is set too high, your history will consume quite a bit of memory and you could be paying for that in terms of performance.

In general, Photoshop works well on current hardware, so there might be something a bit odd about your specific setup. A post to the Adobe help forum might also garner you some suggestions or at least follow-up questions that could help you track down the underlying issue.

Answer 2

It sounds like issues with the hardware graphics acceleration, especially as it occurs on one computer and not another.

Try to disable the hardware accelereation altogether and see if it fixes the problem. If it does, then you can experiment with the different levels of acceleration to see which ones work.

Also, check that you have a fresh version of the graphcis drivers installed.