How to speed up saving and opening Prism files on a Windows network drive.

If you use Prism 5.02 or earlier: 

When you save files directly from Prism 5.02 to a network drive, the process can be very slow. There are actually two problems:

• PZFX files include compressed information. The compression/decompression steps work very slowly when the file is on a remote networked drive. 
• PZF files are also a bit slow over networks. Prism builds, and opens, the files in chunks and this can be slow on some networks. 

The first problem has been fixed with release 5.03. Opening PZFX files is much faster now. Update. 

If you use Prism 5.03 or later:

Saving and opening large PZF files over a network takes about three times as long as on a local drive. The only work arounds  are:

• Use the PZFX format. These files are much smaller so save faster. You can choose to save in PZFX format from the File..Save dialog, and can make this the default in the Preferences dialog.
• Save to a local drive and then (outside of Prism) move the file to the networked drive.
• Make your files smaller. Note that you can make a layout that includes graphs from several projects. 
• Choose the option to save files in a compact format which leaves out analysis results (which are recomputed when the file is opened). This option is on the File tab of the Prism Preferences dialog. This option won't make a huge amount of difference, but it might help with files that contain lots of analyses.