Extremely Slow Composing

I am running a HP Windows XP Professional Version 2002 with Intel Core 2 Quad CPU and 3.48 GB of RAM.

Also running Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.0 with FusionPro 7.2.

This job is raffle tickets with 12 numbers up on a 8.5 x 11 and I'm composing it on an 8.5 x 11 14,220 records (with static background being suppressed) at a time in batches and it takes about 2 hours 45 minutes for that. I wish it would go faster because I have to do that 10 times for 142,200 to complete it. Not sure if that is normal or what?

Also every few times Acrobat crashes, but could that be because I am running PitStop Professional 6.1 also?

Any feedback would be great.

Thanks

Brad,

Even with a newer CP and running CS5, I would think it would still take pretty long to compose your stated campaign locally on a desktop.

Do you get a lot of these types of print campaigns in? If not, you might be stuck with what you got as a smaller print shop will not pony-up for equipment/software upgrades.

This is our biggest one we've had and before this our biggest was 30,000 with only 6 numbers on it and so that doesn't take too long in chunks.

They're not sure if they do these runs once or twice a year though, but if they use the same numbering then I'll be alright because they will already be composed.

Thanks for the heads up.

Thanks for the heads up.

If you get into heavy volumes where "time" is now against you, you may consider Direct with FusionPro. Being able to work on one job locally while a "big job" is composing on the server, is so nice to have.

The PC you are on now should get upgraded. I believe you are maxed out on the RAM your PC can handle now and the OS/Adobe CS would help it dramatically with being more stable.

We have a similar problem with compose speed on a well-equipped PC taking running far slower than the resources of the system would appear to allow. I posted a more detailed explanation in another thread, but suffice to say I have tried many things to get faster composition to no avail.

One handy tip that might help you in either case is that with newer releases of Acrobat, multiple instances can run pretty well together. It's probably safest to do this with Acrobat 9 or X; i have had no trouble with Acrobat X and FusionPro but it's the only addon we run, so YMMV. To start a second copy of Acrobat, just hit Start->Run and enter "acrobat /n" in the run dialog. A second copy will start and allow you to keep working while your job is composing in the background.