So I just bought a new notebook and I'm wondering why Photoshop runs so slow on it. On easy, small files it's fast but on layouts that have a lot of layers & all that it's incredibly slow. The laptop has an i7-3632QM with 8 logical cores, 8GB's of RAM at 1600 MHz and an 8750M GPU and a 750GB WD 5400RPM HDD. Do I need more RAM, should I buy an SSD ?
P.S. I'm using Photoshop CC.
An SSD is more beneficial than your typical hard drive and its an upgrade I seem to always do when dealing with a production machine. Your other specs seem ok, typically a min of 8GB is recommened, which you have so I would suggest looking at your Performance settings in Photoshop. You can get to the performace area by going to Preferences -> Performance. I am on a Mac but you should still be able to modify the amount of RAM allocated for Photoshop. I wouldn't advise setting it to 100% or you may get a BSOD:
The SSD is indeed the only thing that could help this 20 year old mess run a little better. Otherwise, any increase in hardware power only translates to small improvements in PS.
There are settings you can customise to get it to work better and you should find articles on optimising the cache levels or how much ram to allocate.
One tip you won't find, is turning off the Rulers when you don't need them: https://twitter.com/WeAreHyperion/status/673298762975084544
