[rattlsnak]

not sure about a mac, but cs4 takes about a solid 2-3 minutes to load on my 1 year old high line laptop. runs ok once loaded but it uses a tremendous amount of memory and processing power. (runs fine on my desktop, which is a very high power gaming pc) dont think where its located, as in an internal or external hard drive, would make that much of a difference.

wait, do you mean just PS CS4, or the Adobe Suite CS4? (which comes with DW, FL, FW, etc..) PS itself, isnt that bad to run..