New laptop has problems running CS5.

[Bernie Johansen]

Hello everyone, I bought a new laptop last week which I thought would be able to run my CS5 very comfortably, but it is really struggling with performing really simple tasks.

I printed and brought in the system requirements when I was selecting a laptop (found here), and I bought a nice-looking Toshiba laptop with a 2.4GHz i7, GeForce GT 630M and 16GB of ram. All my drivers are up to date. This is also my first time using Windows 8 if that matters.

My problem is that every time I open Premiere Pro, import some clips and start to try and edit video, it lags like crazy, does everything really slowly and I have no idea why. An example is that if I select a video and press play, it will wait 5 seconds before the video begins playing, and then within 5 seconds the playback has slowed so much that it will play barely 3 frames per second.

My desktop PC has a slower video card, the same amount of ram, a 3.3 GHz i5 and runs Premiere Pro almost flawlessly. So I am completely stumped about what I can do to get this new laptop to perform as well as I thought it would.

If anybody has any ideas about what I could try to improve this would be greatly appreciated. :)

[Mark Watson]

What model of Toshiba? What are the HDD specs? Have you tried putting your project on an external drive to see if it makes any difference? Your laptop has USB 3.0 probably, so I'd get a USB 3.0 drive and see if the computer's HDD is the bottleneck.

[Bernie Johansen]

Laptop model number is Toshiba Satellite P870. Hard-drive specs are here: MQ01ABDxxxH (MQ01ABD075H, MQ01ABD100H) - Toshiba SPD - Product Detail

I had a 3TB external hard drive filled with tonnes of important data die on me last year, and I don't like using them for anything important any more.

Hope this info may help you :)

[Harm Millaard]

Have you 'tuned' this laptop? Turned off indexing and compression on all drives, permanently removed the Sidebar, MSN, games, fax services, turned all not-needed services to manual or disabled in accordance with the Blackviper list, removed the crap that Toshiba comes with, killed all processes that are not needed, turned off hybernation and recovered the disk space from hyberfil.sys, adjusted your power profile, etc.

See Tuning Windows 8 - Page 4 for some suggestions.

If the link you gave is the only disk you have in that laptop, you have a serious problem. Not only is it a single disk, but it also is very slow. You would be much better off with a SSD for OS & programs PLUS a separate 750 GB 7200 RPM conventional disk, not a 5400 RPM disk.

[Mark Watson]

As Harm points out, that HDD is never going to cut the mustard. I'd give the laptop away and get something with much better specs.

If you want to try to make it work, then you'd want to upgrade the internal HDD to a fast SSD. If you want anything close to 1TB, you're going to pay about $1,000 just for that SSD.

It does have USB 3.0 ports. You could put your projects on 1TB WD Passport drives. To prevent data loss, you should have some sort of back up scheme no matter if you're using internal or external storage.

[Tim Kolb]

USB3 is fast enough for editing with many formats.

You may have had an external drive die once...but the truth is that internal drive isn't any more bullet-proof. They die too...all the time.

You won't be able to do much with that laptop the way it is. It would seem smartest to keep the lower power consumption C: drive when you're on battery and getting email or whatever, and get some decent external storage.

[Bernie Johansen]

Thanks for all the help guys, I've called the place I bought it from (gigantic Australian megacorporation called Myer), and mentioned that I showed the guy the system requirements and he very confidently told me this laptop would run the software perfectly. They want me to bring it back with box and receipt, etc., but maybe just buying a new external hard drive for $100 would be the more practical way to go about this.

[Battle Vaughan]

Wondering if you have GPU rendering enabled. (Project settings > general >renderer > GPU acceleration.)

If your 630M card is not recognized you may have to do the "GPU hack" that has been discussed at great length on this forum.

Might check edit >preferences >memory to see how your ram is allocated, as well.

[Bernie Johansen]

Hello again everyone, thanks a lot for the help, I've now transferred all my footage onto a USB3 external, but it still hasn't fixed anything. I've also assigned all the scratch disk settings to the external, but the software itself is installed on the C drive. Should I also reinstall the software onto the external? Or is that a silly idea and I be wasting my time by trying?

[Bernie Johansen]

HOLLLLLLD the phone, it now works 100% perfectly. Not sure why it took a few hours, but everything is now perfectly smooth running with footage from the external. Thanks again for helping me figure out what was slowing my laptop down, kind folks at dvinfo.net!