NX turned into a DOG

[GroovyGeek]

Ever since I upsized my HDD NX turned into an ABSOLUTE dog. It was never a speed demon, but it was always acceptably crappy. I lived with it because I like the capabilities it gives me, non-destructive and instantly reversible editing and all, not to mention the fact that until recently as a pure converter it blew away all the competition. I read here and there about people's claims that theirs was unacceptable and thought it was all an exaggeration.

However, recently I bought a bigger and better one, 465 GB 7200 rpm. The old one was around 250 GB and 5200 rpm and I moved it into a secondary bay and use for backup, I also have Win7 installed on it on a separate partition. NX immediately turned into a dog --- 30+ seconds to launch, over a minute to open an image with a moderately complex sequence of edits. The computer is reasonably powerful and up-to-date ---- 2.4 GHz quad core CPU, 4 GB RAM, Vista with all the latest patches.

Before you blame it all on Vista, note that NX was OK before I upgraded the HDD, the problem appears to be strongly related to me installing a new HDD. Has anyone experienced that, and how did you deal with it? One possible clue is that there is A LOT of hard disk activity when NX is launching or opening any file, almost as if it is running out of memory and has to rely on VM. Another interesting thing is that NX tends to be just as slow when running under Win7.

 

[Retief]

Check your cache settings, now that you have 2 drives set up your cache to the 2nd drive. I'm running Vista 64 Ultimate on a Quad Core with 8gb RAM which made it even faster from running Vista 32 with 4gb. I'm guessing cache settings have changed when you made the change.

 

[GroovyGeek]

I did change my cache settings to the secondary drive when I ended up with one, and this is where they weretoday. I just changed them back to the primary drive to test things, and if anything things are slightly faster the cache is on the primary drive. I also did some timing tests:

1) Time to launch: 15s --- this is just NX itself, no file
2) Time to open & render a file straight from camera: 5s --- NX already running
3) Time to open & render a file with moderate edits: 22s --- NX already running

The edit list for #3 is nothing too complicated: USM to enhance local contrast, two color control points, high pass sharpening, convert to SRGB, convert to 72dpi. Once NX has dumped it into its cache things are considerably zippier, but the first time is a pain in the behind.

Grr, this has caused me to download Lightroom trial only to discover that I still hate it as much as the last time I tried it

 

[Harry Lavo]

Did you tranfer your old HD using a transfer program, or did you reinstall everything?

 

[Palouse]

Have you checked out the first 2 stickies in this forum by Mike Buckley? He has specific speed-related help, especially about .net framework and C++ and the order they need to be loaded in. I just up graded my desktop and added a second drive and followed his instructions to a T--and have no problem (XP) and I also redid my laptop installation (Vista) and reinstalled all my programs, and also have no problem.

 

[e_No]

Interesting. I used to think ViewNX was a pig, then realized I was using it on an old IDE drive hooked up to the only IDE port on my otherwise ATA system. Around that time, I decided to buy an external ATA drive (hooked up via firewire), and suddenly, ViewNX became quite speedy... well, let's not get carried away, but let's just say I can convert 5 NEF to 16-bit TIF in less than 1 minute, which is my standard for acceptable performance. Access to RAW data after tweaking exposure compensation or WB is also quite peppy compared to what I used to get.

 

[OlivierW]

Have you more data on your new drive?
Have you tried partioning and make a 1/3 size partition at the beg. of the physical drive (where the speed is usually the fastest) for your pictures.
Have you checked that your path for temp folders are still fine?
Maybe one idea might help.