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Adobe CS3, A Very Different Experience On My New Computer

Since I got my new computer, I’ve been busy installing software, installing Office, email and other basic applications as well as setting my new Vista environment and getting familiar with it. I’ll post later about my impressions on Vista.

But Saturday, I finally installed Adobe Design Premium CS3 on the new machine. All I can say is wow! I liked CS3 a lot before but I really LOVE it now. The Suite was workable in my old computer but load times were excruciating. I also couldn’t have Dreamweaver and Fireworks open for example and then run a Skype session with a client to discuss a project detail while I was making edits which is a common occurence for me since I do sub-contracting work for other Web design firms on top of working for my own clients.

Now, even the "heaviest" apps like InDesign and Photoshop open in seconds and Fireworks CS3 seems to almost "pop" open. I’m sure the AMD Dual Core CPU helps a lot as well as the 4 GB of dual channel DDR2 Ram on the machine but mostly, I think the 250 GB Seagate SATA NCQ hard drive I use as my main system drive contributes a lot to the incredible application load (as well as system boot up) times I get. Also, I though that once they were loaded the CS3 apps were pretty responsive on my old machine but I was quite wrong…

My only disapointment with Adobe software on my new machine is that I cannot install ColdFusion MX7 on it as I’m getting blocked ports and other problems even if I’m not running a firewall since I’m behind a router now. Worse still is that ColdFusion 8 will not support 64 bit systems (either Vista or XP) which is disapointing. Server apps are exactly the kind of software that could benefit most from using a 64 bit architecture so I do not understand Adobe’s decision in this instance.

The workaround I’ll be using is to have my old XP box run ColdFusion and I will use that as my local testing server. I’ll need to format and re-install XP on it though as Networking is hosed on that box. Vista sees it but the XP box won’t let it connect and it does not "see" the Vista box. As soon as I get all of my settings files out of the old machine I’ll format it and install a clean copy of XP SP2 on it. I’ll leave it as a barebones installation running minimal software like ColdFusion and MySQL and hope it still has a few more years in it like that.

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