Indesign CS4 Beachball of Doom issues

[jim.spurr]

Am running Indesign CS4 on a a mac running 10.4.11, mac speed is 1.8ghz with 3gb of ram installed. I am getting the dreaded beachball of doom over 30 times a day on various pieces of artwork which is extremely infuriating and time consuming, tried restarting mac etc but still the same, tried running just indesign and suitcase but still issues to be had, is there anything to tick off the try and fix list or is the problems due to the mac now being quite dated and no company upgrade is imminent but maybe speeded up if it is a hardware/operating system issue.

Starting to get a bit fed up doing a force quit only to see Indesign is not responding message.

Thanks in advance people.

 

[Sherbert]

Have you reset the Indesign preferences file? Try that.

What is the actual machine? PPC or Intel? Dual Core Etc..

 

[jim.spurr]

I am running G5 Power PC.

How do you do the reset preferences process, unsure how to action this?

Cheers

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

There are several things that could be causing your doom. Are you working from a network folder?
Back in the old days we'd fall asleep during photoshop updates, there is still the beep when done option in PS

Are you using high quality display? Are you using much transparency, remember InDesign renders live. Are your pictures the right size scaling works fine, but it does eat processors? Do you have live preflight enabled? (good funcion but process and memory intense) Are you placing AI, PDF and PSD or other formats? I find best result using native AI, PSD and PDF were needed.
Just some questions to get you going.

 

[Sherbert]

Hold these keys down after program has launched/is launching

Mac: Command+Option+Shift+Control
Windows: Control+Alt+Shift

 

[Sev]

I would guess it could be, as Lukas mentions, the live preflight function. That slows down InDesign to a crawl for me, and most of the time I have to keep it turned off. Nice feature, but does slow InDesign down by a huge amount.

-Sev

 

[jim.spurr]

how would I know if this preflight feature is present and how do you turn it off to test to see if this is the issue?

Cheers

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Turn the preflight off bottom left corner, (after page navigation) you will have a red or green light if errors or no errors.
or uncheck "on" in window: output: preflight

 

[hansman]

As someone else said 1st try re-setting the prefs.
Also
Try running the console program alongside In Design & when it hangs check the messages.
What was the last message?

 

[frailer]

All of the above, plus perhaps download and install Cocktail, and run a full cache clean. Maybe Repair Permissions while you are at it.

Cocktail - Download