Mid 2011 crashing when running photoshop

[Jungles999]

Hi all

I have a mid 2011 iMac, 8gb Ram, i5 second gen and 512mb on board graphics.

I run it with an external ssd via thunderbolt and am happy with its performance

Except when I use photoshop and the system freezes randomly. It freezes other times too and I’ve tried to do a fresh reinstall.

Is it the insufficient graphics card? Or lack of cache? It’s definitely not the ram because I rarely go above 6.5gb in usage. I’m just trying to pinpoint the problem.

I don’t want to pay huge bucks for a new iMac just to be able to use photoshop when it’s running fine.

If my iMac can’t handle photoshop I’ll just have to delete but any advise would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

[mikehalloran]

Hi all

I have a mid 2011 iMac, 8gb Ram, i5 second gen and 512mb on board graphics.

I run it with an external ssd via thunderbolt and am happy with its performance

Except when I use photoshop and the system freezes randomly. It freezes other times too and I’ve tried to do a fresh reinstall.

Is it the insufficient graphics card? Or lack of cache? It’s definitely not the ram because I rarely go above 6.5gb in usage. I’m just trying to pinpoint the problem. ...

Is this a trick question?

The answer is yes to all the above. Photoshop likes RAM, GPU and fast storage—only one of which you have in this 2011.

Random freeze and release is a classic symptom of not enough RAM.

Your system is likely making calls to that HDD. Get it out of there.

This problem will not be solved without an infusion of cash. Increase the RAM.

My wife has this exact iMac if it’s a 27”. i replaced the drive with an SSD and upped the RAM to 24GB. that’s so she could use Word and Quark Express smoothly — not nearly the load that Photoshop puts on one of these.

This is the wrong machine for Photoshop. 8G RAM for this use is insane.