Moving PL7 to new drive on the same computer (Win11)

DxO PhotoLab
1

I originally installed PL on the mechanical D:/ drive of my laptop because the SSD C:/ drive was small. Photos are also stored on the D:/ drive. Recently I upgraded to a larger C:/ drive and would like to know if moving either PL7, the images, or both would materially improve PL7 performance, and, if so, how should it be done.

I’ve searched here for guidance, but the best I could find (In the thread Moving Photolab to a new computer) contains enough of what seems to be confounding information that I’m not sure what to do.d

For background, the computer has a Ryzen 7 CPU with Vega10 integrated graphics (PL7 indicates that the GPU is "Partially supported with warnings about stuttering). This is a secondary computer, so the number of images processed in PL and stored there is small (less than 200). This is my 2nd of the 3 installations allowed for PL Elite.

So, my questions:

  1. Will moving PL7 &/or the photos from a mechanical drive to a SSD improve either in-app rendering or exporting?

  2. As I read prior threads, if I want to move PL to the SSD, I could just delete it from the mechanical drive, install it on the SSD (re-entering the code), and then just copy over the images and .dop files. The new installation will rebuild the database from the .dop files. Is this correct?

  3. If I do that, how can I avoid it using my last available installation (of the 3 allowed with PL Elite).

Thanks

2

My answers:

  1. Unlikely. In-app rendering depends on the CPU. Exporting depends on the GPU and you’ve already said the GPU is only partially supported. The SSD will though improve anything involving disk access, e.g. you’ll find the machine boots much more rapidly and browsing files and folders will be more responsive. The time taken to open applications should also be less, as that too is a disk access intensive process.

  2. If you copy the db to an external drive, e.g. a USB stick, then you can copy it back again after you’ve reinstalled PL.

  3. Contact DxO Support before you do anything and tell them what you want to do. Explain clearly to them that you are going to totally, irrevocably, delete the current activation, because you are replacing the HDD with an SSD, so you want to know how re-register your new installation of PL without it using up another activation.

3

Thank-you. If rendering or exporting won’t get speedier, then I’ll leave things as they are. My main installation of PL is on a desktop computer with an SSD, and the time it takes to start up PL7 may be faster than my laptop, but not by enough to make moving the laptop installation to a SSD.

4

What else do you use this laptop for? You will notice the machine is more nimble if you replace an HDD with an SSD.

Years ago I turned a painfully slow to use, even just running Firefox, Windows 8.1 laptop into something usable by upgrading changing the HDD to an SSD, and adding more RAM.

5

Mostly I use it for writing and spreadsheet building. I also use it to cull the clear losers among images from a photo session.

It booted and did those things pretty well even before the new SSD, as the old C:/ drive was also a SSD, but too small for both the OS and substantial other software. The new drive gives it more space as Windows continues to expand, and I was hoping that some of its other apps might start and run a little faster when they are moved from the mechanical drive to the new, larger SSD.

For now I’ll leave PL and the office suite on the mechanical drive and just move Inkscape and Gimp to the new SSD. See if that helps them start.

6

An update on progress speeding up PL. I change the performance preference to have PL use my “partially supported” Vega10 graphics processor despite the warning that partially supported devices could lead to stuttering. So far results have been excellent. Where exporting had been taking several minutes per image on this computer, it is not down to 15-20 seconds. Rendering is also noticeably faster. So far no sign of any problems.

7

Until November last year I was using a PC bought in 2016 with an Nvidia GTX 750Ti (2Gb dedicated memory) graphics card. I can’t remember exactly when the “partially supported” option / warning first came in (PL6 possibly) but ever since then I used this card without ever experiencing any glitches (and it gave considerable export time reductions compared to the “CPU only” option).

With PL8 however, the card is just ruled unacceptable and I had to resort to “CPU only” until I bought the new PC (and graphics card). So, if you’re ever tempted to upgrade to PL8 I’d use the trial option to confirm whether you’re graphics card is supported at all before purchasing.

1 Like
8

Thanks for the heads-up about possibly losing support of a GPU on upgrading.

One fact I left out of my status update was that processor preference was not defaulting to CPU only, but to Auto. Apparently, though, PL never automatically selected the GPU because rendering times were always 2-5 times longer and export times ca. 10x longer than they are now.