Vaio F (Corei7) Owner - Question about sluggish Photoshop CS4 Performance while drawing

For all the other Vaio F users out there, I'm wondering if you have experienced [severely] sluggish line rendering with the brush tool in CS4

I'm an illustrator who uses a graphic tablet with Photoshop. With the specs of the Vaio F, I at least expected it to be able to render lines at the speed of my hand. Yet, all strokes lag behind at least 2 to 4 seconds after lifting the pen. Keep in mind, the canvasses I draw on are typically on the range of 3000x2000 pixels or so, and I use on average a 5-10 px standard round brush. So, not very taxing, really. I had an old Pentium4 system with 512MB in 2005 that could draw lines much snappier than this is doing. That fact has lead me to believe that it can't be a fault of the hardware, but software. Either something with a variation of settings I haven't tried yet, or some major inefficiencies going on between Windows 7 and CS4.

All of the Vaio's drivers are up to date, and none are standard microsoft drivers.

If anyone has worked with CS4 and experienced similar slow-downs, and found a solution, I will be extremely grateful for any help

 

Try checking the power settings? Sounds like everything is moving at a down-clocked state. Click on the battery icon, and choose high-performance. I would recommend tweaking all the default settings to your preferences, just incase.

And a final check, goto VAIO CONTROL CENTRE and make sure the laptop is running at either BALANCED or HIGH PERFORMANCE mode. SILENT MODE essetially keeps the CPU running slowly to prevent heat build-up (thus keeping the fan quiet).

And we you have done all the above, restart Windows, just incase some settings don't kick in immediately.

Hopefully that helps.

If it doesn't, I would have to assume your OS is riddled with bloatware, but then no amount of running bloatware should lag Photoshop (and a 5 pixel wide brush at that) to such extent. You may have to disable some processes. But like I said, the default bloatware should NOT be causing issues.

And in the case of you using PhotoShop with battery-only power, nVidia GPUs (well, the 9300 on the older Z) with the latest hybrid drivers from Sony downclock horrendously if left to idle (to save battery levels). They do this in AC power as well for some unknown reason, and require you to get the machine 'running' again to bring the GPU up-to-speed.
A way of checking whether it is running down-clocked is to do the Windows Aero Flip (Windows key + Tab); is that laggy? Enter and exit the 'flip' numerous times if it is laggy, since after the 3rd or so time it should be flipping through smoothly (thus not running downclocked).

There was a custom app somewhere here (I think in the Nautis's Z's custom hybrid driver thread), used to overcome the downclocking issue. I used that and set my Z to run full speed when on AC, and to downclock when idling when on battery. You may have to search for it by the way. The thing is, it wasn't like that with Vista as default.

~~~Regardless, good luck~~~