Force Firefox to spellcheck all fields
- Go to about:config and heed the warning
- search for layout.spellcheckDefault and set its value to 2
Improving Photoshop CS4/CS5 Performance
Note: This was initially written for Photoshop CS4, but from what I've seen, it also applies to Photoshop CS5.
If you're having performance issues after installing Adobe's latest version of Photoshop, try having a look at these options:
Allocating more memory to Photoshop
- Edit -> Preferences -> Performance to allocate more RAM to Photoshop.
- Don't use too much (over 90% for example), your OS will need RAM too!
- Don't allocate too little.
- Experiment, try 60% and work your way up or down.
Set up a scratch disk
- This is similar to virtual memory.
- Photoshop needs at least 2GB, but more is recommended.
- It's recommended that you set the primary scratch disk to a different hard-disk than the one Windows uses for its virtual memory or paging file.
- To set up your scratch disk options (requires Photoshop-restart): Edit -> Preferences -> Performance
Set up your cache-levels
- Used to redraw high-resolution images faster.
- The levels range from 1-8 (default: 4), the more levels, the more image-caches Photoshop keeps and the slower images load.
- Setting the cache option to 1 disables image caching.
- Setting the cache option to higher than 4 improves performance when working on large images (by redrawing faster).
- If you use many levels (50+), set the cache option lower: 1 or 2
- If you deal with large-dimension images, use a cache option larger than 4
- To set up cache levels (requires Photoshop-restart): Edit -> Preferences -> Performance
Purge Undo, Clipboard, or Histories
- This clears up memory
- Edit -> Purge
Reduce the number of History states
- By reducing the number of history states, you decrease the amount of memory used by Photoshop.
- To set the number of history states: Edit -> Preferences -> Performance
Saving PSD files with the compatibility feature
- This increases the size of the PSD file by saving a flattened version of the image too.
- If you don't need the compatibility, save without it.
- To set up options: Edit -> Preferences -> File Handling
GPU use
- CS4 makes use of your graphics card's GPU, instead of the computer CPU to speed its screen redraw.
- The display card must support OpenGL (with at least 128MB RAM).
- The display driver must support OpenGL 2.0 and Shader Model 3.0.
- Make sure you have the latest drivers for your GPU to improve performance.
Disabling OpenGL
- If you experience really poor performance, you might want to try experimenting with turning OpenGL off all-together.
- Edit -> Preferences -> Performance -> Untick OpenGL
Minimize palette preview thumbnails
- Each layer has a preview-thumbnail, minimize the size of these to save memory
- To minimize (or turn off) palette thumbnails, select Palette Options from the palette menu.
- For Thumbnail Size, select the smallest thumbnail size or select None, then click OK.
Bigger Tiles plug-in
- Disabled by default.
- Located in the Optional Plug-ins folder on your application DVD folder.
- Enable only if you have more than 1GB RAM.
- Copy to your extensions folder to enable.
- When enabled, Photoshop redraws more data at a time because each tile is larger, and each tile is drawn, complete, at one time.
- That is, Photoshop takes less time to redraw fewer tiles that are larger than it takes to redraw more tiles that are smaller.
- If you spend most of your time painting or rapidly tweaking controls in filters or panels and watching the feedback, then Bigger Tiles won't help you.
- If you spend your time watching progress bars, Bigger Tiles can improve performance.
Performing WordPress upgrades (Linux)
Note: Remember to always refer to the official upgrade guide. This is by no means official, but it has worked for me. I've tried to keep it as short and easy as possible.
Another Note: WordPress 2.7 comes out on November 10th. It will have an automatic updater module - so you probably won't have to worry about this kind of thing again after that!
Versions tested with:
- 2.6.3
- 2.6.2
- 2.6.1
- 2.6.0
Obtain the path to your wordpress installation, we'll assume it's
1 | /home/user/www/blog |
Safety first. Always.
So make a backup of your WordPress installation folder:
1 | cp -rp /home/user/www/blog /home/user/www/blog.backup |
Next, you'll want to make a backup of your MySQL database associated with it.
Refer to my Simple MySQL backup script to see how to do it.
You're good to go now - you'll be able to revert any changes you've made if you have to. (And that's a nice fuzzy feeling)
Let's get busy:
- Make an update directory to copy new files from
- Get latest WordPress zip file
- Unzip
1 2 3 4 | mkdir /home/user/www/blog/update cd /home/user/www/blog/update wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip unzip latest.zip |
Just to keep things clear, we have 2 directories at this point:
New files:
/home/user/www/blog/update/wordpress
Original files:
/home/user/www/blog
Delete your old wp-includes and wp-admin directories (I rename them here, which has the same effect).
1 2 3 4 5 | mv wp-includes wp-includes.old mv wp-admin wp-admin.old mkdir wp-includes mkdir wp-admin |
Copy over the new files (NOTE that I haven't used the '-rp' flag for the last copy command):
1 2 3 4 5 | cp -rp /home/user/www/blog/update/wordpress/wp-includes/* ./wp-includes/ cp -rp /home/user/www/blog/update/wordpress/wp-admin/* ./wp-admin/ cp -rp /home/user/www/blog/update/wordpress/wp-content/* ./wp-content/ cp /home/user/www/blog/update/wordpress/*.php ./ |
Log-in to your admin-page. If WordPress needs to perform a database upgrade, it will do it for you.
Check that all your plugins are enabled and in proper working condition.
Optional: After you've tested everything and you're happy with the upgrade, you should delete all the extra files:
1 2 3 4 | rm -r /home/user/www/blog/wp-includes.old/ rm -r /home/user/www/blog/wp-admin.old/ rm -r /home/user/www/blog/update/ rm -r /home/user/www/blog.backup/ |