Predictable Photoshop/Vista nightmare...

[Swisstony10]

So I finally got myself together and bought a new laptop, because my old one was old, heavy, creaky and basically knackered. It couldn't cope with anything more recent than PS Elements 2.0.

The new one is lovely - nice and fast, with a lovely clear 17.3" monitor. The only problem with it is that it's running Vista Home Premium. Autostitch works fine, as does Photomatix and Portrait Pro. Three of my favourite applications.

Unfortunately, I can't get Adobe CS3 to work. I've had a good look online, and all I can find is references to installation problems, which I don't think is necessarily what I'm getting. The whole package installs smoothly and (reasonably) quickly - it's only when I try to start Photoshop (or any of the other components) for the first time so that I can register, nothing happens. Photoshop will look like it's going to start, but it'll just sit there doing nothing, and all the other bits of CS3 don't even fire up.

Has anybody else had the same thing with CS3 Vs Vista, and if so, what did you do about it?

(And please - no replies telling me I should've bought a Macbook Pro. I had various reasons for not buying one, and not having £1800 available at the time was one of them... )

Russ.

[Ray Dockrey]

Two things I can think of right off the top of my head. One, have you tried right clicking on the icon and choosing run as administrator. This should be an option and even if you have admin rights on the machine you sometimes have to do this. Beats me why. Second, right click the icon, choose properties and then choose the compatibility tab. Try running the program under something else like Windows XP. This probably won't work but it is worth a shot.

[Doug Pardee]

My wife is running CS2 under Vista-64 just fine. I'd expect CS3 to work, too.

You'll find that a lot of older programs need to be set to run in a compatibility mode. Probably half or more of my wife's existing programs needed to be set to run in XP compatibility mode. They work fine that way.

Here's an article that describes this: http://blog.rrdphoto.com/2007/07/fix...-on-vista.html

[Swisstony10]

Thanks folks - I just tried both of those (running as an admin, and with compatibility set to Windows XP), and neither worked. I had a look at that article, and I tried setting the default printer to the XPS Doc Writer as someone suggested, and that made no difference either. Photoshop fires up, and then goes to Not Responding after about 3 or 4 seconds, and all the other CS3 components still do nothing at all.

When I was planning a new lappy, I figured I'd just buy a copy of XP at the same time, and wipe Vista, but when I got this one, it came with a free upgrade to Windows 7 when that comes out, and I'm told by people who've been running Windoze 7 Beta that it has all the prettiness of Vista, with the workingness of XP, so I decided to just battle through with Vista for a while until 7 comes out. It's not really worth me shelling out £70 for 6 weeks of Windows XP.

This laptop didn't come with a Vista system disk, so if I do get a copy of XP, I won't be able to switch back to Vista to take advantage of the free upgrade, which is quite annoying. Sometimes I wish I was more of a techie-geek. I might have a fighting chance of doing stuff with Windows then.

Thanks for the help so far, anyway.

Russ.

[m.c.adams]

I,m sorry I really can't help, but for whats its worth, I have 2 vista home premium laptops, one with CS2 and the other with CS4 and have had no problems. They run fine.
Mark

[Free]

CS3 works fine on my PC running Vista.

How much RAM do you have? Vista needs a LOT of RAM, so anything under 4GB - forget about it.

If you've got the RAM, then the next thing I'd do is go into your system configuration utility (push windows key+r and type "msconfig") - go to the startup tab and uncheck all the crap that the manufacturer has starting up by default (It can be hard to tell what should be running, if it has a program name in it, turn it off. If it has no program name and it's in /system32 probably worth leaving it there).

Restart your system (if you turned something you shouldn't have off your machine may not start properly here - Don't worry, start it up in safe mode (push F8 during start up) and go back into msconfig) and turn some things back on until you get a proper start up.

Also, try uninstalling and re-nstalling PS just incase something went wrong there.

If you've only got 2 gb RAM, you might be in trouble, my laptop just runs cs3 on XP, I can't image it would work in Vista.

Hope that helps
Free

This will stop all the useless programs starting up and getting into your RAM. Once you've done this, also try turning your display performance properties to the old win 98 look. This will make vista use WAY less RAM and really speeds photoshop up. I can't remember how to get to the performance panel in Vista at the moment (not at home) but on XP it's right click the My Computer icon and hit properties, it might be somewhere similar on Vista?

[WVCoalMiner]

I doubt WIN XP will intsall in that newer VISTA machine. I have heard people having NIGHTMARES trying to wipe VISTA and install XP (Newer hardware won't run on XP). Also check your HD there should be a recovery partition that has the VISTA recovery disk on it. If it is an HP I know that's where it is located.
I have 3 Laptops and 1 desktop 3 running VISTA and 1 Laptop running WIN 7 and all versions of CS3 and CS4 run just fine. I would UNINSTALL and then do a Reinstall just to make sure.

[archersdad]

I have a CS3 and a CS4 install on different computers both running Vista and have had no problems. As others have suggested, try uninstalling. Restart. Run regclean. Install. Restart. And see if it will run.

[Jamesc359]

Another idea is to change the compatibility mode of the setup file on the install CD before you install it. Then launch the setup file through explorer and not the autorun feature. I know this sometimes helps with some older games that I've installed.

[Doug Pardee]

Originally Posted by Swisstony10

Thanks folks - I just tried both of those (running as an admin, and with compatibility set to Windows XP), and neither worked.

Have you tried the Adobe Swiss Army Knife which fixes a wide variety of ills in many Adobe products: blowing away the preferences file?

On Photoshop just hold CTRL-ALT-SHIFT while it's starting up. It should ask you if you want to delete your preferences. Click "Yes" and see if things get going again.

Alas, you'll then have to reset all your preferences. But that's life in the Adobe world.

If that doesn't work, it's time to call Adobe support.