Set the process to high priority

[DeafBug]

I have dual boot partition of Vista, in one is Vista 32-bit and the other is Vista 64-bit. The second partition originally was for my work as I telecommute. Now that I am laid off and there was no need for it... until now. I blew it off and installed Vista 64-bit and Adobe Premiere Elements and Photoshop 7 bundled software. And nothing else.

It still causes freezing and such as Windows does it stuff in the background. I have learned several tips and suggestions to improve Premiere. One of the suggestions was setting the application process to High Priority in the Task Manager. The only negative with is that it has to be done every time you launch Premiere.

I knew there was a way around it and it took a bit of digging up. Simply create a batch file and run it every time you want to do task consuming stuff. Setting to High Priority every time may not be the wise thing if you don't leave you computer on all the time. I won't go in details why but just giving you a warning.

So let's start.

Right click somewhere on your desktop and select New | Text Document. Name the document to "Adobe Premiere - High.bat" without the quotes or whatever you want. Important that you end with ".bat" extension. (Again without the quotes.) Click Yes when Windows prompts you to change the extension. Your icon should now be a picture of two gears. If you still have that paper icon, don't continue until you resolve it. Check your Folder Options settings that you are showing extensions.

Now right click on newly created icon and select Edit. It will open a Notepad with an empty file.

Assuming you install Premiere to its default settings for folder location. Copy the entire line below and paste it in Notepad.
start "Pre" /high "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0\Adobe Premiere Elements.exe"

Close Notepad saving its changes.

You're done. Now you have a batch file that will run Adobe Premiere with High Priority process set.

Explanation for those curiousity cats!
Start is the command line that is part of Windows.
"Pre" is the title that the Start command will assign to the command window, which you will not see but it is required.
/high is a command switch to set the process to.
"C:\Program Files\..." is the full path name that is copied from the application's shortcut properties. Yours may be different if not installed with default settings.

And if you still curious, open cmd.exe and type start /? for full information. I put "Pre" in because I already used quotes for the pathname since it has spaces. If there were no spaces in the pathname then "Pre" won't be needed. It is just to trick the start command.

Now if you don't like the icon for the batch file, (who wants to see gears.) Move the batch file that you created somewhere, like the C:\ root drive or in the Adobe Premiere folder where the real executable file is. Once you moved it, right click on it and create a shortcut, (I prefer to use Send To | Desktop (create shortcut) instead of Create Shortcut.)

Once the shortcut is created, right click on it and select Properties. Click on the "Change Icon" button. Go to the Adobe Premiere Elements.exe file and select it. There you can pick the nice icon for the batch file.

Now you are done.

Enjoy!

[Bobby]

Interesting "Bug" - thank you. But your system shouldn't be "freezing and stuff" and I am surprised that just changing the task priority fixed that. After doing a clean, fresh install of Vista 32 you shouldn't be having such problems.

[DeafBug]

Well, the Vista 32 has all the other garbage that I need to live with such as Nero, MS Office, Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc. Plus it only sees 4 of my 8 GB of RAM. I have full intentions of upgrading to Win7 64-bit. Memory and CPU are recent upgrades to my computer. So until I get my hands on Win7, I will do a clean install and see if I can do away with the second partition. In the meantime, I am just living with the freezes in 64, it no longer crashes like it does in 32. The project I am doing is huge. Just loading one project of 30 can take up over 3GB of RAM.

Whatever the reason, 64 does better than 32 on memory management. I do have resource monitor running so I can watch the blue line. It freezes when it hits 100% on the hard drive. If you click on Premiere anywhere during the freeze, you get a white screen. It goes away when it unfreezes. I rather have the freezes than the crashes since I don't lose my changes.

I am also patiently waiting for Premiere Elements 8 (or 7.5 or whatnot), hoping it will be 64-bit version like the Premiere Pro is now. That should make all my troubles go away.

It is also nice to set it to High Priority when you are about to render a movie. It will be in minutes rather than hours.

[Steve Grisetti]

Nice solution, Brad -- and nice follow-up to our discussion in Minneapolis! Thanks!

[DeafBug]

Turns out that my "freezing" is the hard drive. I ordered a new one and transferred the files from the faulty to the new, everything ran just fine. Only time it freezes is during heavy pagefile swapping.

It took a while to troubleshoot the hard drive. Even with the SMART turned on and such, everything checks out okay. What made me realize was the heat. The cold hard drive works just fine when I first boot up for the day. When it gets hot, it starts to act up. I guess no hard drive monitoring/troubleshoot software is gonna tell you that.