boosting photoshop on bxcell chipset

[c4a]

i have a client which i sold him 1 year ago INTEL p II 350 with a pc-chips sis 620 vga CHIPSET -onboard.
this client uses NT SERVER with 128 mb of ram and udma 8.4 gb quantum HD.
there is adaptec 2940 who's connected externally to industry standard scanner and internally to YAMAHA CDR 6x4x16 (which i connected yesterday).
he need me to boost his photoshop performance, because he works with large files in photoshop (20-40 mb) and turns them to b/w from color ,and stuff like that.
what is the best price/performane solotion that i can do without risking my butt to replace his mainboard ?

i thought that replacing the cpu to P III 500 will do.
i heard there is a microcode bug in P III 550 and 600.

dont know if it will be wise to put more memory or second HD for temp files.

pleaese tell what you think .

[replier]

definitely upgrade the ram from 128 to 256. We did something like that similar to your customer. Our customer had a pII 400 system with 128 mb of ram and was running Adobe Photoshop 5.0. He said his system was starting to bog down from handling alot of graphics. Adobe Photoshop will definitely take advantage of 256 mb of ram. Our customer was very happy.

[Grafman]

I would recommend cramming in all the fastest RAM that the motherboard can support, or that the client will spring for. Graphics are notorious memory hogs. When you are processing a large graphic, the machine deals with as much as 3 to 4 times more data, maybe more, depending on the operation. Faster processors don't help much if there is insufficient memory available, and any time you're using a HDD to supplement memory, things s-l-o-w down.

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