Adobe InDesign CS4 slow on G5s but not Intel machines

[Designer Lee]

Ever since our design studio upgraded to InDesign CS4, some of our machines are now VERY slow to open documents (it takes documents approx. 7–13 times longer to open). Also, just using InDesign seems much slower than CS3 (like dragging things, typing, etc.).

The funny thing is this problem only seems to affect our designers who have PowerPC G5 Macs — not the ones with Intel Macs. I realise CS4 will be optimised for Intel machines, but surely it shouldn't be this much slower on G5s?

Anyone have any idea what the problem could be?

Lee

 

[maflynn]

Its probablyone of two things:

The current OS and applications are more optimized towards the intel platform

The intel platform is much much faster then the PPC platform.

I suspect its more of the latter.

 

[Designer Lee]

Sorry, I should have given more specs.

All our machines use Leopard (OS v10.5.8)

Other specs:

Machines with the problem:

* 1.8GHz PowerPC G5
* 3 or 4 GB RAM
* Geforce FX 5200

Machines that don't have the problem:

* 2 x 2GHz Dual core Intel Xeon
* 5 GB RAM
* Geforce 7300 GT

Its probablyone of two things:

The current OS and applications are more optimized towards the intel platform

The intel platform is much much faster then the PPC platform.

I suspect its more of the latter.

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't think it could be simply a matter of speed because we can still open our documents really quickly in CS3, but when we open them in CS4, it takes a lot longer.

 

[Designer Lee]

OK, I've had a breakthrough with this.

After a lot of testing, I've realised that the only documents that open slowly are actually CS3 documents. Where I work, we're constantly opening old documents (catalogues) to grab content, without saving, so we open CS3 documents all the time.

So I guess to solve the slow document opening problem, we're just going to have to remember to re-save every old document we open as CS4.

Our problem still remains of InDesign CS4 being a bit slower on the non-Intel machines, although this is much less of a nuisance to us than the opening documents problem, which was really annoying!