Sony Vaio SZ61MN - brand new but can't handle airbrushing in Fireworks / Photoshop! HELP?!

Hi everyone

I have just purchased a brand new Sony Vaio SZ61WN laptop. My previous laptop was also a Sony Vaio and had a 15.4 inch screen with 512mb ram, 80gb hard drive and I believe around a 1.6 processor. The SZ61WN has far superior specs - 2gb ram, 140gb hard drive, core 2 duo processor, etc. Much better graphics card also.

On my old laptop, editing photos in Fireworks was a piece of cake, it could handle it with ease. However, the SZ61WN simply cannot handle it! When I launch Fireworks and select the erasor, airbrush, paintbrush, blur tool or anything like that, the cursor flickers like crazy and goes into a sort of slow motion when I attempt to do anything to the photo - it just can't handle it. I cannot understand for the life of me why it can't handle this kind of task - surely with the specs this laptop has, it should handle it with ease?

I have already adjusted power settings for optimum performance but this makes no difference whatsoever. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Please help!

Many thanks for your time

Adam

 

P.S. Just realised I got the model number wrong in the title - it should read SZ61WN - sorry! (I've fixed it for you - John)

 

It could be all the junk Sony installs running in the background and taking up all your resources. Have you tried a semi clean install? It's very easy process, and helps a lot. Take a look at the following guide http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=146033&highlight=semi

 

Yeah, it can't be due to the hardware itself. I've done Fireworks, Photoshop, and Gimp work on much less hardware than that.

What you're describing sounds like a software issue, quite possible a video driver problem, to me. I've seen buggy drivers cause similar problems in certain applications. Have you tried updating drivers? If that fails, try a clean install.

 

Here you can get the latest drivers: http://laptopvideo2go.com/