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.