Adobe PDF Reader slower than Molasses? Speed up Acrobat Reader 10x+

December 02, 2004 Comment on this post [10] Posted in Musings

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Here's a great little free util that Omar has found. I used to move the plugin's manually to speed things up, but PDF Speedup makes me NOT DREAD opening a PDF anymore. BTW, does Acrobat 6 suck LOTS more than Acrobat 5? I HATE the new Find Dialog.

I have previously written about how darn slow Adobe Acrobat 6 is when launching. I don't understand why Acrobat is so darn annoying. Here are some things I don't care for:

* Don't create a “My eBooks“ folder in My Documents when I have nothing to put there.
* Don't load 500 plugins when none of them are necessary to view a PDF
* Don't place shortcuts for some lame Internet Printing thingy in my Start Menu (I loathe Start Menu Advertising)
* Do install a PDF IFilter so that indexing products like Lookout can index PDFs w/o installing it seperatley
* Don't load PDFs in IE because it is god awful slow
* Don't make copy and paste so freaking hard
* Don't ask me to install other Adobe software when I boot Acrobat
* Don't create an updater (6.0.2) that creates an additional entry in my add/remove programs

If you want to fix most of these things, PDF SpeedUp is a free application that should come bundled with Acrobat. It's a must have piece of software to make Acrobat behave (as much as you can anyway). [shahine.com/omar/]

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Comment on this post [10]

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December 02, 2004 10:22

God, I hate the new Find in Acrobat 6, too. I want the page to move for me every time I hit F3.

vbNullString

December 02, 2004 12:25

I found the site down at the moment - the bloggers must of overwhelmed the server :) Top 5 google results all link back to the same server too - but download.com has it for people who want it.

Tim.

Tim Haines

December 02, 2004 13:13

That's odd, it's up now. Ah, the fickle internet.

December 02, 2004 16:28

Works as advertised. Beautiful!

Jeff Key

December 02, 2004 18:19

Holy Crap! Now when I google up a PDF document I don't have to "View as HTML" anymore!

--Stuart

P.S. Hi Jeff Key! :)

Stuart

December 02, 2004 19:45

You forgot to rant about the fact that the IE embedded reader stays in memory after you close that instance of IE. I have to use task manager to kill the process every stinking time.

Steve

December 03, 2004 0:19

I like the feature of Acrobat 6 that asks you if you want to keep prompting you to look for updates even after you have told it not to. They need to remove the no button on that dialog.

Brett

December 03, 2004 17:51

Hey Stuart. Long time no "see"!

Jeff Key

December 03, 2004 21:03

When I run PDF Speed Up, I get an error and then, when I run Acrobat Reader, I get a bunch of error messages, each one of which requires pressing the OK button, further *slowing* the loading of Reader, not speeding it up. The Restore functionality is handy, though...

Chris Sells

December 13, 2004 23:23

Here's a tip for you.

The Acrobat Reader site will force you to download version 6.0 UNLESS you tell it that you are still using Windows 95. (Then you get v5.0).

- Joshua

Joshua Bair

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