Speeding up Thumbnail Generation

[Geoffrey Hervey]

I believe that there is a way to speed this up, but I cannot recall.  When I open a folder, even one that I have visited before, the thumbnails appear fairly slowly. 

My system: Win XP Pro (soon to be new machine with Vista)
Folders contain NEF images from D200.   My images are shot as RAW only, not combo RAW/JPEG.

How can I make the thumbnails pop up more quickly when the contact sheet opens?

[Kirk Baker]

I believe that there is a way to speed this up, but I cannot recall.  When I open a folder, even one that I have visited before, the thumbnails appear fairly slowly. 

My system: Win XP Pro (soon to be new machine with Vista)
Folders contain NEF images from D200.   My images are shot as RAW only, not combo RAW/JPEG.

How can I make the thumbnails pop up more quickly when the contact sheet opens?

What is the resolution of your images?  What thumbnail size are you using?  What is the speed of your computer?  How much RAM does it have?  Is the drive that you have PM store its cache an indexed drive?  What are your current PM caching settings?  (Preferences->Caching)

There are a lot of variables that determine the speed at which PM can generate thumbnails and browse images.

-Kirk

[Geoffrey Hervey]

Thanks for the response.  Part of it is probably my computer, which is 6 years old.  That is why I am waiting for my new one to arrive, with 4GB ram, running DuoCore processor at 2.4GHz. 

Right now I only have 1GB of RAM  on a Pentium 4 CPU at 1.9GHz.  Running Win XP Pro.  The drive on which I have the images is a separate internal drive (separate from the drive that hosts my programs).  I am not sure what an "indexed" drive is.  The RAW images are from a Nikon D200, and the native resolution of those images (uncompressed NEF) is 3872x2592, @ 240.  The thumbnail size is the default PM size.  I did not realize there were Cache options for PM (I only recently got the program); what would you recommend for an older system like mine to speed it up a bit?