Adobe Creative Suite Standard CS2 Description:

Adobe Creative Suite Standard CS2 review:
5 stars (Quark to InDesign - Easy as 1-2-3) - I've been a QuarkXpress user since 1990 and I thought i would never find an equal. Well I have....it's called InDesign. With a Visual Quick Start book in my lap, I learned InDesign in a weekend and over the next 2 months, I designed a 54 page magazine using the program. And one of the best things about InDesign is how easy it is to produce PDF files, which is a real pain using Quark.



Another plus is Adobe, a first-rate company. They let you try out any of their programs for a month. I did this with InDesign to see if my G4 running 10.28 could run the program and it did, with no problems. The new quark requires Tiger OS.



I'm glad I made the switch, I'm never going back!
4 stars (More Features, Less Speed/Stability) - I've used both Photoshop and Illustrator for many years now, and I've been continually impressed by the new features in each version that have made my design work easier. CS2 does deliver with a number of enhancements in both tools and interface for both products. The good you can read in the press-release info above, and yes the new features are great.



The unfortunate downside to CS2 is performance. If you do not have very good hardware, expect a performance decrease with CS2. For example my Quadro video card only has 64MB of memory, but Photoshop CS2 really needs 128MB or more to run smoothly. Without it, Photoshop will sometimes pause for a moment as it has to catch-up with your commands. Also expect 1GB of system memory as a real need, 2GB preferred. You can even run with up to 3GB in XP SP2 when the /3GB switch is set in the boot.ini, and PS will use it.



Photoshop used to run pretty well with one HD, but it was preferred to have two physical drives to separate the windows paging file and Photoshop scratch disk, where data files could share some space with scratch disk on the second hard drive. Now for better performance, you need three separate hard drives: one for windows and applications, one for documents/data and the paging file, and one just for the Photoshop scratch disk. If you only have two drives, you're still better off with everything on the first drive, and just the scratch disk on the second.



Illustrator CS2 is also nice, when it runs at all. Apparently there's a bit of a resource problem with it in that it will startup, load all the fonts and plugins, and then popup a can't continue message. When you get that and click OK, Illustrator closes back down. There are a number of community-documented workarounds, such as working with very few fonts, having more memory, never running any other applications at the same time, booting Windows fresh before each use, and even deleting specific configuration files so that Illustrator created them again on load. These fixes work for some people, but for others nothing has helped and they literally can't run the product. For me I usually just boot fresh and open nothing else.



I have not personally used the rest of the products much yet, but overall they are good. The new browser is a great improvement. InDesign is light-years better than PageMaker (but then anything would be). Acrobat seems a bit faster, etc.



So if you have serious graphics workstation or simply work in a high-end design house you need not worry (and are probably not likely to be reading this review anyhow). For the rest of the Adobe-using community, don't get CS2 without reading up a little on it. The user forums at [...] are a good start. It's overall a good product, but there are bugs and hardware is a real issue. I still give it 4 stars, because CS2 is overall a really, really amazing package. If it weren't for the problems, it would be 5 stars from me easily.
5 stars (Great!) - Adobe products for digital imaging are far and away above the rest. I am a science illustrator and produce many drawings and publications. I utilize this software in a PC environment and have had no difficulties in getting the high quality illustrations and publication layouts my field demands.