Interesting... I have set mine to 92% (of 1GB). I do quite a bit of work on large 500+MB files... I wonder if this is a clue... Regardless, I know that PS has vanished during sleep while I was working on a few web projects - those files are seldom over 5MB, not quite pushing any limits. ;)

hisbonenus, how about you? What's your memory allocation?

What about scratch disks???
 

Do you have a scratch disk? I am not a designer, but I have worked for a bunch. I recently configured a ibook 900Mhz for this photographer/website designer. She had some weird production fashion photos she was selling to some magazine company. The magazine company had all these preferences you had to follow to submit a picture (like size, color, layers, lighting, etc etc). Well she was having problems with photoshop, she had 512 mb of ram. I ended up making a scratch disk partition for pshop, and it really helped the performance of the problem. I gave pshop a whole gig of scratch disk space, and she has not been back by to complain or make me fix her ibook again. Maybe this might help some of you, I don't know.

Re: What about scratch disks???
 

Dedicating a partition to PS would definitly speed things up because there would be no fragmentation, as the only files being written to the partition would be the temporary 'swap disk' files which are deleted upon ending the PS session. It would also help with switching between apps as PS needs to re-optimize the info in RAM after switching to other apps which take some of the memory PS was using. it does this by heavily accessing the 'swap disk' file (when switching back to PS) and assigning new info to be stored in the now smaller amount of RAM. I'm not sure if that would help. It could. I can't try it, but if anyone else has the means, I'd be interested in hearing what happens.

Yeah, you would have to repartition your whole HD, and would effetively lose all data. Unless there is a partition magicesque program out there for the mac. I have no idea if there is one.

Yeh, guess that would make a lot of sense, using a dedicated scratch disk.
All the old Bondi iMacs in Uni were set up like that. But I'm only a light user at the moment (havin to take some time out from uni-long story) All I've used 'Elements for is occassionally cropping a few approx 1MB jpgs from my digital camera. Not exactly taxing stuff. Thats why I've only experienced the problem a few times, because I've barely used it. Luckily I've never lost anything important, but it must be a real worry for people who use Photoshop daily.
In that situation, the obvious solution would be just have the display set to sleep.

Rob.