Pew Pew Laser Blog

The "What Changed" Method of Troubleshooting.

Last month at the office, Photoshop suddenly became very very slow to launch and open new documents. It was really quite unbearable. In fact, I had even noticed that Word was slower to launch, but that wasn't as much of a problem as Photoshop, which I use all the time. I happened to complain of this to our Creative Director, and he said that it was the new printer driver for the brand new office copier/printer, and I should set my default printer driver to the PDF Writer.

I never would have figured out that the new printer driver was causing all of my trouble. Even when I was doing tech support for printers, if a customer had complained to me of a slow computer, I never would have thought to try a different driver.

But I did switch the default driver to the PDF Writer, and then Photoshop continued zipping along as it had in the past. Until the next day, after I rebooted the computer. Sadly, it turns out that our IT group sets a user's default printer on log-in. So I had to remember to re-set the default printer to the PDF Writer each time I logged on, or suffer with a very slow Photoshop.

After two weeks of this, I wrote a ticket to IT, asking that if they could not fix the new printer driver, to please quit changin with my default printer setting. The response I got back indicated that fixing the issue was a low priority item, and I should quit rebooting my computer so often. Sigh.

The good news is that just yesterday (3 or 4 weeks after I wrote the ticket), we have a new company printer driver. I am happy to report that both Photoshop and Word are quite acceptable with this new driver.

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