Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

Appendix C: Installation and Troubleshooting 529

Troubleshooting

The installer creates a desktop shortcut to Elements. To launch Elements, double-

click the shortcut or right-click it and choose Open.

Registration

When you first launch Elements, it asks you to register the program. You can run

Elements without registering it, but you get a couple of advantages if you register.

For one thing, Adobe hangs onto a record of your serial number, so if you ever

misplace the number, you can get it from Adobe. Also, when Adobe releases new

versions of Elements, there’s usually a rebate for registered owners of previous

versions.

Scratch Disks

Elements uses a scratch disk—reserve space on a hard drive to supplement your

PC’s memory—when it’s busy making your photos gorgeous. The calculations Ele-

ments makes behind the scenes are very complex, and Elements needs someplace

to write stuff down while it’s figuring out how to make changes to your image. It

does so by using a scratch disk if the task at hand is too heavy-duty for your sys-

tem’s main memory alone to cope with.

You probably have just one hard drive in your computer, and Elements automati-

cally uses that drive as the scratch disk. That’s fine, and Elements can run very hap-

pily without a dedicated scratch disk.

TIP You can make Elements really happy by keeping your hard drive defragmented and mak-

ing sure there’s plenty of free space available for ...