Disabling Advanced Graphics Settings.

[gyrene81]

according to what skuzzy says, using an ssd as a scratch disk is not a good thing...for photoshop it's almost constantly writing temp files to the scratch partition.

SSD's usually suffer performance issues when they are written to a lot.  Generally, it is not a good idea to place programs on them that do a lot of writes.

i did a google on lightroom scratch disk and found a couple of tidbits:

If you think of Photoshop, where the changes are applied to the image file, then you will need a scratch disk, and the more you process the image, the more space you will need. So as not to depend on the operating system's swapfile/pagefile CS3 allows you to specify a scratch disk.

Lightroom, on the other hand, does not modify your image file. Instead it records your changes in its catalog (.lrcat) file. The changes are never applied to the actual image file, but they will be recorded in a separate part of .jpg image file or in a .xmp (called a sidecar file) for proprietary camera-raw files when you choose to save metadata.

Lighroom will render a preview of the original file, when you import it into Lightroom. You are given some options about previews: size and quality. The preview cache is stored in same folder as your catalog, so it is probably wise to choose a fast disk for this.

All the stuff that Lightroom does, is recorded as a series of steps: if you process a file and save the edits to it, you can use a simple text editor to view the settings that Lighroom records. For example if you change exposure you will see something such as "crs:Exposure="+0.86" in the metadata section at end of the file.

In any case, if you choose a bad location for your catalog, you can simply move it to another place and have Lightroom locate it at start-up. You do not have to worry too much about witchcraft in that regard.

Of course, you should also keep a backup of your catalog on a separate drive; you can choose to do this when you start Lighroom. Use Edit->Preferences, and click Go To Catalog settings to configure backup frequency. You can specify the backup location if you then choose to do the backup when Lighroom starts.

Lightroom will allow you to move the image data to another drive. Just point it there when you import. You can also relocate them within Lightroom.

You can also place the Lightroom library, previews, etc. on another drive. It doesn't need to be the same location as the image data. I keep the library and previews on the internal disk of my laptop so it's always available, but the image data is on external disks.

[Monkie]

I have the exact same issue with Vista 64-bit. When I start the game it's super slow on the frames, advanced graphics disabled, after about 1 minute everything is smooth as silk and I have to re-enable advanced settings. This wasn't doing this until a few patches ago so I'm guessing something must have changed.