Photoshop CS2 slowness solved.
Feb 11th, 2006 by tyler
Have you experienced slow performance with Photoshop CS2? I have a reasonable development machine at home, P4 3.0 ghz, 1gb ram, ATI 9550 256 mb etc, but when I installed CS2 months back it was so sluggish, I switched back to CS.
Today on a whim, I decided to do some searching and see if I could find a solution or workaround. After a few searches, I found a solution where you’d never think to look…. Adobe.com 
The slowness of CS2 comes from certain video card’s drivers not properly implementing the 2D API.
Adobe recommends the following solution:
1. Choose Start > Control Panel > Display.
2. Click the Settings tab.
3.Click Advanced.
4. Click the Troubleshoot Tab.
5. Do one of the following:
- To disable hardware acceleration, move the Hardware acceleration slider to None.
- To reduce hardware acceleration, move the Hardware acceleration slider to a setting between None and Full.
(I only moved the harware acceleration back 1 notch on my system and that was enough.)
6. Click Apply and then click OK to accept the new setting and close the dialog box.
7. Restart Windows and Photoshop.
Now I am as speedy as I was with CS or even PS 7.