Installation of Photoshop CS4 needs More Than 2 Hours

Ready..steady........2 hours later...

I just invested a substantial part of this months salary in an upgrade for Adobe Photoshop CS4. The download of the 900MB file from the Adobe online shop took me not more than 15 minutes. The Akamai content cluster serves this downloads and it was fast and reliable like always. However, once I started the installation I really could not believe how slow the installer uncompressed the files. It took me 60 minutes just for this step. The following installation procedure took another hour. What went wrong there? Did Adobe build in a super slow installer this time? Or is my 2 ½ years old Asus Centrino Dui Notebook with 3GB RAM just not suitable anymore for Photoshop CS4? Ok, Ok, my MacBook Pro is already ordered and should arrive within the next couple of days. Goodbye Windows XP. But until then…

Another thing that I did not like about the installation: I had no option for a real “upgrade” of my old CS3 installtion. As nice as it is to have Photoshop CS3 as well as CS4 on my harddrive, it costs nerves to manually copy and reinstall all of my plugins, actions and toolpresets now in Photoshop CS4. The installer could have handled that much more elegant.

But enough complaints, now Photoshop CS4 is on my disk and the fist impression of the new userinterface is… amazing! It’s simply great! And the new option “Localised Color Clusters” in the Color Range dialoge has good chances to become my favourite option 2009. And Adobe Bridge now seems to run even faster than Lightroom2. Unbelievable! I am really looking forward to start using CS4 now.

Cheers, Michael