Many of you students use Adobe products for making over-sized prints, mainly in color.
If you were unaware, Photoshop and Illustrator create large temp files that contain everything you have done. This temp file expands exponentially for each change or addition.
Since most students use laptops to complete school work or personal digital art, the processing and computation speed can be effected regardless of the amount of RAM or actual hard drive space.
The basis of the scratch disk is to store temporary changes, but using these two programs on the same hard drive as the scratch disk actually causes a lot of delay in the function of both Photoshop and Illustrator.
The solution is to reassign the scratch disk to another drive. For desktop users, adding a second hard drive is the best option which will move the temp files on to a drive not associated with the running of these programs.
For laptops, an external hard drive is the solution. Plugging in an external drive and allocating space on that will greatly assist in the performance of these programs.
The scratch disk option is under:
Photoshop
Edit
Preferences
Performance
Illustrator
Edit
Preferences
Plug-ins & Scratch Disks
Assign the scratch disk to another drive or attached external drive. Laptop users must have the external drive attached before starting Photoshop/Illustrator or the scratch disk will not initialize.
This is one of the simplest solutions for slow performance of Photoshop and Illustrator.