I installed Photoshop CS on my home machine because Photoshop CS4 runs like a dog, even on my quad-core machine beast. I do still use the rest of the CS4 applications, because their enhancements are actually worth using. But, that’s a whole different story…

Anyway, if for some reason you’re using Photoshop CS in Windows 7, you might find your layer dragging going quite slowly, and things generally not working at full speed.

To fix this, go to your Photoshop shortcut and right-click it. Select Properties, then the Compatibility tab. Check the box marked “Disable desktop composition” and press OK. When you start Photoshop, Windows will go into “Basic” color mode, which looks like crap, but your Photoshop will now run smooth as silk.

On a side note, I also had to do this for 3ds max 9. I don’t remember the exact issue, but it also required old-school access to the screen drawing.