[epluth]

Sorry, I don't often post here, so if it's been covered, I could not find it...

I recently upgraded to 10.4 and upgraded to CS3. For a few years whenever I open a document in any Adobe program, my external hard drive has to start turning and I have to wait until it is done before I can get back to work... (usually 10 seconds) I cannot find anywhere on how to turn this function off. It is 'really' annoying.

Is there anyone that can steer me in the right direction. I've tried the OS prefs pane, as well as the Adobe prefs, but cannot get it to stop.

I'd be very grateful. Thank you!

[Nivag]

The scratch disk preference is under Performance in Photoshop CS3 - you can remove your external drive from here.

If you're hard drive isn't listed then I'm guessing it's your external drive is going to sleep and every now and then it gets woken up and Photoshop is doing that. The only way I can think to stop it is to turn off the 'Put the hard drive(s) to sleep when possible' option with System Prefs > Energy Saver

[Big Mac]

That's what came to my mind too. Subsequent access to the Open dialog within the same period of time should not result in the same delay.

[Don Pickett]

The issue here--as already pointed out--isn't use of the scratch disk by Adobe programs, but that you probably have your disks set to spin down when possible. You do not want to turn off the scratch disk use in some Adobe programs, like Photoshop, as they're explicitly designed to use scratch.