InDesign is very very slow, even with 1 gig RAM

[Sam577]

Hi,

I am dealing with an extremely slow InDesign 2.0.2, even though I have 1 gig of RAM, which should be ample.

Does anyone know why this would be so? Could it be because it is installed on the same drive as the rest of Adobe's Design Collection?

Many thanks
Sam

 

[viol8ion]

What is extremely slow? Do you mean it takes 2 minutes to open? Or is 20 seconds slow to you?

We need a little more info to go on.. do you mean slow to load? Slow to open a document? Slow to navigate a document?

Also, what are your system specs? Any extra info you give us will help.

When in doubt, deny all terms and defnitions.

http://www.wuli.com

 

[Sam577]

Hi,

The package takes from two-five minutes to open. Opening a document is also very slow (two-five minutes). The other problem is when swapping between InDesign and other packages -- ID takes a long time to load up again (again two-five minutes). It also often freezes and shuts down and gives no reason except 'Microsoft has encountered a problem and is shutting down'.

Navigating around the document doesn't really present a problem.

I'm surprised that I'm having these problems because this particular publication only contains text and a few tables. There are no images or graphs. The source file is an RTF. This is because Word 2000 never worked for us -- it wouldn't even allow us to place it in our template, but RTF does work (albeit formatting being slightly knocked out, bullets, italics etc.). The only other thing the source file contains except text is a lot of index entries.

The most serious problem I'm having is generating the index. It just won't work. When I try to generate an index, InDesign freezes and closes with no warning -- not even the usual 'Microsoft has encountered a problem and is shutting down'.

Do you think that there is a problem (some sort of corruption) in either the Word source file or our InDesign template?

Here is the full spec of my machine:

Microsoft Windows XP
Professional
Version 2002
Service Pack 1
Dell Workstation PWS360
Intel
Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHz
2.99 GHz
1.00 GB of RAM

Many thanks
Sam

 

[jimoblak]

Do you use a font management program? How many fonts do you have installed? Can you disable all but the system fonts and then try to open ID? The sluggishness may be caused by a bum font.

- - picklefish - -
Why is everyone in this forum responding to me as picklefish?

 

[viol8ion]

Follow Jimoblak's advice, even though XP is supposed to handle fonts better than older versionsof windows, whcih choked when one had more than 150 fonts active, try to pare down the active fonts, especially removing any free fonts.

Also, do you have a lot of plugins installed? Try moving them to another folder and see if you open any quicker. 2 minutes to open ID is way too slow, hell, it takes me 20 seconds to open ID2,0 on an NT 4.0 on a 500Mhz PIII, and 12 seconds on a 2.4Ghz P4 with W2K and only 512Mg of RAM.

If all that fails, I would suggest uninstalling it, deleting all temp files, doing a scan disk, defrag, and do a clean reinstall.

Also, make sure that you are not running Norton AV during install. If you are running it now, what happens if you disable and then open ID?

When in doubt, deny all terms and defnitions.

http://www.wuli.com