Speeding up Adobe Acrobat

This is probably old news to many people, but since it will benefit those who've missed it quite greatly, I must share this one with you all.

Those who have used several versions of Adobe Acrobat on their PCs will find that recent versions of it is quite bloated and slow, even if you tweaked your system to its best. And, oftentimes, when you use Acrobat plug-in on your browser, you have to click “Checking for updates” dialog box before you can proceed to see the PDF file you just download.

If you're like me, who usually open up a bunch of PDFs several times a day, this could be a major annoyance.

And even with these issues aside, scrolling in Acrobat is way too sloooow. Reading several APIs and programming manuals in PDF format can numb your eyes and right hand pretty quickly. Imagine what would happen if you have to sit and read those PDFs all day. (-.+"

Fortunately, the version 7 of Adobe Acrobat improves greatly from its successors. It loads faster, and by default it doesn't show its distracting logo when it starts. The scrolling seems snappier than before, too.

But you can crank the performance up even more, if you know how to disable Acrobat plugins.

Open up Adobe Acrobat reader, and go to Help → About Adobe Plug-Ins, you will see a big list of plugins that Acrobat needs to load whenever it starts. These plugins can be found at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\plug_ins.

If you know which plugins you usually use, then this is a piece of cake. You can just start moving those plugin that you don't need from \plug_ins to \Optional. (This actually is what Adobe recommended ..ermm.. silently through the file \plug_ins\README.TXT.) And by doing that, Acrobat will open up faster, since it doesn't have to load those extra plug-ins into memory.

For me, I don't purchase any eBooks, so I basically put away all plugins related to digital signatures, and encryption. I also don't use PDF with any web service, so SOAP is useless to me. I don't usually fill in Acrobat form, nor I like to see those check-for-update dialog boxes every time I open Acrobat up, so I also put them away too.

So, what I have left after the cleanup, is ECMAScript, External Window Handler, Internet Access Plug-in, Search, Sendmail, and Weblink.

And by just doing that, on my computer, Acrobat loads up instantly, alomost like when I open up Notepad. :-D


PS. For those who have used the previous version, and want to upgrade to version 7, I advise you to download the smallest version of it (i.e., excluding Yahoo! Toolbar, Photoshop Album, and those extra plugins that will slow Acrobat down). If you choose the right one, the total download size should be 12.6MB.