Antony’s Personal Opinion

A few days ago, one of my colleagues sent an email about Adobe Acrobat Reader. Like me, and may be also all of you, he was very frustrated using this software because it takes a couple of seconds to start-up. Finally he found a very useful trick to launch Acrobat Reader within 1 second! Yes, may be less than 1 second on a relatively fast machine. I’ve tried this trick and the result is very amazing.

What’s the trick? Very simple…. Open your Windows Explorer and go to c:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\plug_ins folder. Remove all files except EWH32.api, Search.api and Search5.api. Just for safety, backup this folder before you kill them… That’s it; now try to run your Acrobat Reader…

After I got this trick, I was wondering, why do the software companies give a lot of features that the users don’t really need? Acrobat Reader is one example; there are many plug-ins that we never actually used. Basically plug-ins concept is very good; we can extend software easily. This is good for the users and for the software companies as well. What I am thinking of is, isn’t it possible to load plug-ins when they are needed only? Not loading all of them during start-up…

I had the same experience with my mobile phones too. When I was using my old mobile phone (Series 30 phone from Nokia), I can switch it on in less than 10 seconds. Now I am using Symbian-based phone (Series 60 phone from Nokia too), and it takes almost 30 seconds to reboot. Unfortunately, I don’t have any tricks yet to speed this up…

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 23rd, 2005 at 12:36 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.