Get Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 Working in Newer Versions of Windows

Summary

Increase the page file size in Windows. Then it should run.

Introduction

This guide was written for Windows 7 64-bit. I'm not sure if it'll work on Windows 10.

Guide

I recently picked up Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 (for some reason).

As fully expected, I ran into issues. For starters, the autoplay application was broken.

Clicking the "Installation" button just didn't do anything. So instead, you have to explore the CD, go to the "Adobe Photoshop Elements" directory, and run "Setup.exe."

Easy enough workaround to get it installed, but we're not done yet. Upon launching the installed program, I was greeted with this:

Insufficient virtual memory? Considering I'm running Windows 7 with 8gb of RAM and plenty of disk space, this should hardly be an issue. Regardless, I decided to try increasing the virtual memory. To do this, open the Windows System pane, which you can easily do by opening the start menu, then right-clicking on "Computer" and selecting "Properties."

From here, you'll want to select "Advanced system settings" from the left-hand pane, which will open the "System Properties" window. From there, click the "Advanced" tab, and then the "Settings..." button in the "Performance" section. Then, click the "Advanced" tab (again), and then the "Change..." button under the "Virtual memory" section. This will allow you to alter how much virtual memory is allocated for the system.

See how we've got that "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives" button checked at the top? Yeah, well, apparently PSE 2.0 doesn't like that all too much. Therefore, we'll want to:

• Uncheck that box.
• From the "Drive" list, select your drive/partition where Photoshop Elements 2.0 is installed.
• Click the "Custom size" radio button, and enter how much you want to allocate in both the "Initialize size" and "Maximum size" boxes. I chose 12099 as that's what was suggested in the "Total paging file size for all drives" section at the bottom of the window.
• Click the "Set" button. In the list above, you'll see the "Paging File Size (MB)" change from "System managed" to the values you specified.

Here's what mine looked like when I was finished:

Now, click "OK" for all the open windows and fire PSE 2.0 back up. Is should (hopefully) start properly. If it still complains, try restarting your computer. If that doesn't work either, try increasing the value for the page file size.

Addendum

I'm really not sure why you have to do this. I came up with a possible explanation once, but I forgot what it was. I think it was something like: PSE2 checks to see if your allocated page file size is 1.5x the amount of RAM you have, but since we have so much RAM now the page file generally isn't set to that by default. Or, something like that. Anyway, this made it work, so I can't say I really care too much.