Blinking windows issues

mercurii · #1 April 6th, 2008, 01:38 AM

Machine:
3 month old Dual Core 2.4Ghz Macbook pro with 2Gb ram dual booted with windows.

Running:
WindowsXP SP2
Photoshop CS3 (8 open docs with no work done to them)
Firefox (19 open tabs)
Ie 7 ( 27 opened tabs)
Windows media player (playing music from a USB external HDD)
Netbeans IDE 6.0 (one java project in development)

Whats been happening:

I was windows running a couple of applications constantly for the last 2 days and when i got up this morning i tried to save a document in photoshop and it would not save. I tried to check windows task manager (wtm) to see if there was some application that was devouring all the CPU time, but then task manager would not even launch. My instincts told me that this was a memory issue, so i decided to close one of the photoshop files i didn't need anymore. After closing that file i was able to bring up wtm but this time it would not allow me to check the performance tab (it was blank instead of the graphs). I switched to the processes tab and i noticed the all my windows started blinking. I noticed the blinking was in sync with the data updates on the processes tabs and after i closed off all but 4 of the photoshop files did the blinking stop and i was also able to view the performance tab of wtm.

The blinking occurred about every second and occured in all application windows as well as with all my desktop icons.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this or may be able to shed some light on it?

eric2006 · #2 April 6th, 2008, 02:00 AM

Are you running PS on Windows? If so, through what? Bootcamp? Can you recreate the problem with fewer or one app running? Just trying to narrow down the problem.

mvcube · #3 April 6th, 2008, 05:25 AM

"Dual booted with windows" means BootCamp, am I right?

It's most probably a memory problem, if you even can't start or operate TM. Get more RAM!

I haven't seen this behavior, yet, but the way you got rid of it (killing applications with considerable memory demands like PS) lets me think in this direction. If you can't afford more RAM, try to increase the size of your swap space in control panel->system.

Marcus