If you work with Adobe Photoshop, even half as much as you say you do.. I’m sure by now you may have noticed that you are unable to view  thumbnails of PSD files in Windows Explorer. For some unknown reason, Adobe has decided it’s best to just remove this particular functionality for Photoshop users. How amazingly thoughtful of them.

So, if you’re like me and decide you don’t want to have to open a Photoshop, or the Adobe browser, everytime you want to view a thumbnail of a PSD file.. read on.

Here’s a quick, and easy, method of  adding the ability to view thumbnails of .psd files without opening (or heck, even installing!) Adobe Photoshop.

1. First, you need to download the necessary PSD Thumbnail Shell DLL file.
2. UnZip the psdthumbnaildll.zip file you just downloaded, and copy that file to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Shell\ (if it doesn’t exist yet, create it).
3. Download and run this registry file. It will add the necessary changes to your registry to allow the Shell to access the new Adobe DLL.
4. Restart your system.
5. …
6. PSD THUMBNAILS!

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Problem/Symptom:

Adobe’s new CS3 (Photoshop and Illustrator mostly) experiences slow performance and lagging when opening or creating files regardless of size or type.

Solution:

Check your printers. this error is related to the default printer and print service. If you have an offline or unconnected printer, this is most likely your issue. Remove any offline or old/duplicate references to networked printers. If the printer is timing out, you will experience lag in Photoshop and Illustrator even on fast systems.

My Personal Experience: After installing the Adobe Photoshop CS3 Trial and using it for a little bit, I noticed it bogging very badly whenever I would create a new image or open an existing file of any type or size. After searching around for a while, I caught wind of it being printer related, more specifically the printspooler service in windows. I had recently moved and not hooked up one of my networked printers. After removing the offline printers (and printer that was trying to connect but would time-out) Photoshop opened files and created new ones with a snap!! I’m very glad to have resolved this issue, it was getting very annoying having Photoshop lag on a Dual Core system running 4gb of DDR2 on a Rapter! Anyways, glad to have it cleared up! For anyone out there having this same issue, check your default printer and also remove any offline printers or ones that cannot connect!

Note: If you decide to repost this solution on your site, please reference my post above by linking to me somewhere on your page. Thanks!!! Hope this information helps!

UPDATE: If you missed this one, the ability to view PSD files in Windows Explorer is always nice!