Expert: Scott Valentine - 4/11/2008

Question
At startup, Adobe Photoshop returns the alert "You currently have Adobe Photoshop's primary Scratch and Windows' primary paging file on the same volume, which can result in reduced performance. It is recommended that you set Adobe Photoshop's primary Scratch volume to be on a different volume, preferably on a different physical drive."





In Photoshop, I choose Edit > Preferences > Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks.

In the Scratch Disks section, first line the word "Startup" is there and under it "C/" I could not change any.
Also I do not have any other drive except C. So what can i do to correct this problem?  



Note:The partitions you specify as the scratch disks should have free space equal to three to five times the size of the average image file. To create free space, delete temporary files or remove other files from the hard disks.

Answer
Unfortunately, there is no "correction" for this alert. Photoshop is set up to work with scratch disks to help performance. If you are doing a lot of work with Photoshop, or will be using large files, I highly recommend getting an additional hard drive or two. If you have room in your computer case, you can just get inexpensive, smaller drives (250G or so) which you can dedicate as scratch disks.

You can also use an external firewire or USB hard drive, but performance may become slow.

There is the possibility of creating a partition on your main drive, but I really don't recommend that unless you are starting a brand new operating system installation and can format the drive.

I'm sorry I can't give you better news than that. But if I can be of any further assistance, please feel free to ask!

-Scott