Russell Beattie

I'm finding myself spending more and more time in Acrobat lately. It's not my favorite because I wish it was a little more like a browser (I hate when I'm reading and the zoom changes for some reason - like I click somewhere with that hand with the arrow), but it's okay. The problem is that the v6 is dog-slow to start. I just found this and it's a *great* tip:

Make Acrobat Reader 6 load faster

Recently I repaved my laptop to make it a dual-boot Windows Server 2003 / Windows XP machine. I use Windows Server 2003 as my primary operating system, but keep around XP for when I am not connected to a power source (server sucks up the power like there's no tomorrow). Anyway, I installed the new Acrobat Reader 6, and it loads much too slowly! So, after poking around the Internet, I found that it is all the plug-ins that are enabled by default slowing Acrobat reader down. After removing all but 3, it loads pretty much instantly.

Here's how to do it:

1. Go to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader (replace the C if you installed on another drive, like I did).
2. Create a new folder called plug_ins_disabled.
3. Move all files from the plug_ins folder to the plug_ins_disabled folder except EWH32.api, printme.api, and search.api. There should only be these 3 files in the plug_ins folder.
4. You're done.

Fantastic! (And from a dot-net blog no less...) It works like a charm - Acrobat starts almost instantly now (after the first start cleared out the settings I think). Awesome.

-Russ