Thanks guys - 

I downloaded trial version of Coriolus, which showed no fragmentation, and which also recommended running disc tools first - which I did. Then I upped the RAM allotment for Photoshop. That helped a bit, and other things now seem to run better, too. 

Cindy

---- Britt Griswold <[log in to unmask]> wrote: 
> Here is the scoop on file fragmentation as of OS X 10.4
> http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html#Anchor-31774
> 
> defrags files but does not defrag space between files.
> 
> Qoute from the above site:
> "So, now, instead of using a rough rule of thumb on when you should 
> consider defragmenting your hard drive, what I recommend now is that 
> folks check to see how much free contiguous space there is on their 
> drive routinely, once their drive is over 50% full. You can do this 
> quickly and easily with the free demo of iDefrag: 
> http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php
> Or the free utility ShowVolumeFragmentation
> http://people.freenet.de/amichalak/page1/page1.html
> There is no need to purchase anything until and unless you need to. When 
> you have no large chunks of free contiguous space left, you can expect 
> problems to begin to appear if you don't defragment your drive. Note 
> that if you let this problem advance too far, it may become impossible 
> for any utility to work on your drive, protesting that there isn't 
> enough free space on your drive for it to be able to run. (This despite 
> the fact that you may have many gigabytes of "total" free space left on 
> your drive.)"
> 
> Britt
> 
> Bruce Gaber wrote:
> > Well I know Britt will weigh in with true wisdom on this one, but just 
> > to say, that yes, Mac drives do need to be defragmented. I use Tech 
> > Tool Pro for the job. My PowerBook was running very slow for a number 
> > of functions. Defragging helped considerably.
> >
> > While I have no real sense of how long a save should take, a 1 GB file 
> > is pretty large, and I would not be surprised at it taking at least a 
> > minute.
> >
> > Bruce