Lightroom: How To Get Another 20% Performance

Last month I order a new computer from Dell, a powerhouse, a monster, it took 3 weeks to arrive. It’s an Intel iCore7, a 4 CPUs with hyper-threading behaving like an 8 CPUs computer with 8Gb of RAM and a terabyte hard drive. I bought the Dell because it was so cheap, almost $600 less than the equivalent computer at the “cheap” and high volume computer place.

It seems that Dell, HPs and the other computer manufacturers make more money loading the computer with all these 30 days preview software. I hate that, so I reformatted the hard drive and did a clean install. Lightroom performance is very much dependent on the speed of the computer. Today’s tips are for Windows only! They apply to both Vista and Vista 1.1 Windows 8.1.

Tip 1: Switch the Desktop to a less CPU intensive theme

1. Click on the desktop and select Personalize
2. Select on of the Basic / High contrast theme

Tip 2: If you still want to use the Aero

1. Click on the desktop and select Personalize
2. Choose of the Aero theme
3. Click on Windows Color
4. Uncheck Enable Transparency
5. Click on Save

Tip 3: Minimize the Windows animations

1. Click on the Start Button and type in SystemPropertiesPerformance and press Enter.
2. Visual Effects tab and Select Adjust for best performance
3. Click on OK

By the way, most of these tips to speed up your computer can also be applied to any graphical interface, including Windows XP or Mac. Just the menus and the key combinations will be different.