You need minimum 2 Gb RAM to almost work crash free. 3Gb is good. Also, make sure you have lots of room on the HD because PS uses this as a scratch disk unless you specifiy otherwise. Maybe you need to increase the amount of HD to use as a scratch disk. You’re using two huge programs and if they’re both using the same space on the HD….. Go to Preferences and increase the amount of HD to be used as a scratch disk.

sounds to me like your computer cant handle it. my computer (which isnt that great, has 1gb ram, and 1.6ghz processor) has problems running adobe stuff. i have to be closed out of everything else that ***** up processes and ram. (firefox, dreamweaver, etc) but after i close all the other stuff, it usually runs ok, but not great.

maybe when you installed it something messed up.. try re-installing it