When I launch photoshop 7.0 I get a popup that brings up the scratch disk preferences. The message states the currently selected scratch disk is almost full. I can get into photoshop but what does this mean? I have first as startup and second through fourth as none. I have never experienced this before. Should I change something in preferences? Any help would be appreciated.

Much obliged,
Ara

How many disks have you got? Your windows disk should always be your last choice to keep windows disk accesses separate from PS scratch use. If you have another disk put that as the first choice Adobe scratch disk. If you have 3 disks or more put your fastest disk in first slot (not the windows disk though).

I have 3 internal disks.
1. 120GB for windows o/s and applications (65 GB free space left)
2. 300GB for video storage
3. 200GB for video storage

Are you saying that PS scratch disk should be on a disk other than my O/S disk?

Ara

yes. The first slot is your fastest disk or the one with most free space then other non-os disk, lastly disk with os and os scratch on.

Will change as you say but can you explain the purpose of this feature?

Photoshop likes to put microscopic scratches on your disk, and if you let it do that to your OS, it could get corrupted... Sorry, couldn't resist.

PS uses a "scratch" disk to store temporary data, when the available RAM won't cut it. Performance issues are most apparent if you stress Photoshop by working with very large (high resolution for print) files. Designating a scratch disk that's different from your system disk reduces the chance that the disk data pipeline will be needed by the OS when Photoshop would like to be using it.




Regards,
Doug Graham
Panda Productions