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How to Speed up Adobe Acrobat Reader and PDF file opening

June 19, 2006 on 8:39 pm | In windows xp, software |


Dumb Little Man found this little tidbit at DWTips that I wanted to pass along. (and offer my own alternative solution as well.)

DW Writes:

Every time you run Adobe Acrobat up to 20 plugins are loaded unnecessarily - most users do not need even a fraction of them!

To disable unneeded plugins and make them optional instead, follow these instructions:

1. Install the latest version of Adobe Acrobat - you can get it here
2. Browse to the plugins folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\plug_ins
3. Create a new folder named Optional
4. Move all files from the plug_ins folder to Optional, except EWH32.api, print*.api, and Search*.api

That’s it! Load any PDF in Adobe Acrobat to see the difference!

That is indeed a great tip - Adobe Acrobat has to be the slowest, most bloated piece of crap software in computing history. There is nothing worse that unknowingly clicking on a link to a PDF file only to have your browser lock up for 15 seconds while it loads up 50 Meg+ Adobe Acrobat.

Better Solution: Get rid of Adobe Acrobat Reader
I’ve been unable to personally try the above tip because my computers all have a strict “No-Adobe-Software” policy in place. Which brings me to my preferred, alternate solution - get rid of Adobe Acrobat. You don’t need it. There is a company out there called Foxit Software that makes a small, free, and fast PDF reader called (you guessed it) Foxit Reader.

The Foxit Reader is under one Megabyte in size (take that Adobe), and it allows you to easily type right into any document and to easily select and copy text. Adobe Acrobat Reader, on the other hand, is over 50 times as large, doesn’t do either of those tasks very well, and it constantly “phones home” to Adobe, which slows things down even more.

So unless your employer forces you to use Adobe, I recommend that you ditch it and go with Foxit. You won’t be sorry that you did.

If you’re interested in my other software recommendations, click here.

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8 Comments »

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  1. Thanks! That’s an awesome tip. I really despise PDFs and the slow load is a big reason why.

    Comment by Filly Pundit — June 20, 2006 #

  2. Thank god!!! Someone else feels the same way. I can’t not beleive that the entire IT industry hasn’t backlashed against Adobe yet. I’ve been complaining about slow load times and the lock up my PC phone homes for years. Today I found 14GB of Acrobat temp files!!! 14GB!!!!!!!

    I’m uninstalling Reader right now and downloading Foxit!

    Comment by Christopher Deutsch — July 20, 2006 #

  3. I have used Foxit Reader since reading about it in Chris Pirillo’s Lockergnome missives. I love it!
    Don’t miss Adobe Feature bloat at all.

    Comment by Paul Morris — August 10, 2006 #

  4. Unfortunately, the instructions do not apply to Adobe 7.0.8 on XP with SP2. For instructions for the newer Adobe Reader versions, please click below:

    http://www.sb-cg.com/news.asp?strPageRequest=acrobat

    (I have no affiliation with the above site, but I have used the instructions with success.)

    Hope this helps!

    Comment by Otto Zilch — August 11, 2006 #

  5. Sorry, but I installed Foxit on my last computer a few months ago. It royally hosed up my PDF associations in my browsers and I could never view PDF files under I saved them to my hard drive first. It was worse than Acroread.

    Comment by Tom Thomas — February 16, 2007 #

  6. Tom, it sounds like what happened to you is a combination of the following 1) the regular foxit reader doesn’t come with a browser plugin, so when working properly your browser should always ask if you want to “open” or “save,” and 2) you had your browser set to “never ask” whether you wanted to save or open a file of type PDF, therefore it always saved them without asking you if you had a preference. That’s not really foxit’s fault.

    Comment by eddie — February 16, 2007 #

  7. Hi, Foxit sounds great. I presume that with Foxit installed and Adobe acrobat UNINSTALLED, all PDFs will open in Foxit. Correct?
    Advice would be appreciated.

    Comment by Andre Samarcq — May 5, 2007 #

  8. Foxit has a lot of issues with certain PDFs. I’m guessing it has something to do with how certain vector files are embedded in PDFs, because sometimes the redraw time for embedded vectors (think contour maps with LOTS of contours) is incredibly long or even hangs.

    I have had this problem on multiple computers and have nailed it as an issue with Foxit, so I switched back to Adobe which is substantially more reliable.

    Comment by Brian R — August 21, 2007 #

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