18 Replies Latest reply: Jan 22, 2013 7:52 PM by John T Smith RSS

    CS4 stability on Windows 7

    Christopher Duncan Community Member

      Hey, guys.

       

      While I've done some short 2 - 3 minute videos here & there the past couple of years, I just wrapped up my first sizable project. This was a web series with 10 episodes ranging in length from 5 to 10 minutes. After I rejoin the human race for a while, I'll eventually be giving thought to upgrades. I had a pretty bad time of it overall with Premiere. There was never a session that didn't involve multiple crashes throughout the night.

       

      My purpose in writing this post isn't to be negative or beat up on Adobe, but rather to get a reality check from those of you who have been around for a while. I have a solid box for this version of the software. Good CPU, 4 gigs of memory, NVidia GForce 550 graphics card, 16 TB of eSATA allowing me to optimize for multiple hard drives, etc. I also went so far as to put Premiere and After Effects on a clean install of Windows 7 with absolutely nothing (not even anti virus) installed to give it the most pristine environment possible. Nonetheless, the stability issues were consistent and, as you might imagine, somewhat frustrating.

       

      At one point I actually called and talked to an Avid rep to explore my options in that direction. I've been a professional MS developer for over 20 years, so I really don't want to buy a Mac (even if FCP 10 wasn't so controversial). However, a week or so ago I bumped into a post somewhere talking about running CS4 on Vista and covering things like XP compatibility mode, running as adminstrator, etc. and that got me thinking. Is it possible that my problems have been due to running a program designed for XP on the Vista / 7b architecture? Vista was a significant change under the hood from XP, and if CS4 was never updated for that change, the constant problems I've been having wouldn't be that surprising.

       

      At one point I thought perhaps that I was just being an overly critical, arrogant programmer who wasn't cutting enough slack for someone else's code (I mean, you know, not like that ever happens). But then I spent a few days working on audio in Cubase, loaded down with plugins, etc. It occurred to me at one point that I'd run for three days and it had never crashed once, a wildly different experience than what I'd been having with Premiere. So yeah, for whatever reason, Premiere CS4 really is that unstable.

       

      All of this is just the preamble to my question. Is Premiere just finnicky and unstable by nature, or has my problem been with an XP program running on a Vista / 7 architecture? Is CS6 absolutely rock freakin' solid, as Cubase has been for me in audio land? No matter what direction I go, I'm giong to have to shell out for a decent 64 bit box and another chunk of change for software. If CS6 is bulletproof on Windows 7 (and maybe 8?), I'd rather stay with the software I'm familiar with. If it's the same kind of stablity crap shoot that I've been dealing with, however, then I may have to give Avid a tumble, even though they're much more expensive.

       

      I know that asking a question like this on the company forum is sure to get me a few responses of "you're an idiot, I run CS4 on 7 and never, ever have a problem, it must be you!" Nonetheless, I just don't know what more I could have done to baby this enviroment. As I mentioned at the beginning, my point really isn't to be negative. I just want a reality check before I spend more money, and I'm hoping that if CS6 is as unreliable as CS4 has been that there will be those honest enough to pony up & let me know.

       

      Actually, what I'm really hoping is that CS6 is bulletproof. I'm comfortable with Adobe tools and I'd love to keep using them if possible.