Lightroom: Another 20% in Performance

Last month I order a new computer from Dell, a powerhouse, a monster, it took 3 weeks to arrive. It's an Intel iCore7, a 4 CPUs with hyperthreading behaving like an 8 CPUs computer with 8Gb of RAM and a terabyte hard drive. I bought the Dell because it was so cheap, almost $600 less than the equivalent computer at the “cheap” and high volume computer place.

It seems that Dell, HPs and the other computer manufacturers make more money loading the computer with all these 30 days preview softwares. I hate that, so I reformatted the hard drive and did a clean install. Lightroom performance is very much dependent on the speed of the computer. Today's tips are for Windows only! It applies to both Vista and Vista 1.1 Windows 7. But they will again improve the Lightroom performance since the computer will not be busy managing the display.

Tip 1: Switch the Desktop to a less CPU intensive theme

  1. Click on the desktop and select Personalize
  2. Select on of the Basic / High contrast theme

Tip 2: If you still want to use the Aero

  1. Click on the desktop and select Personalize
  2. Choose of the Aero theme
  3. Click on Windows Color
  4. Uncheck Enable Transparency
  5. Click on Save

Tip 3: Minimize the windows animations

  1. Click on the Start Button and type in SystemPropertiesPerformance and press Enter.
  2. Visual Effects tab → Select Adjust for best performance
  3. Click on OK

By the way, these tips to speed up your computer can also be applied to any graphical interface, including Windows XP or Mac. Just the menus and key combinations will be different.

Tags: Dam | Lightroom | Lightroom-How-To | Technical