OS X users are fortunate enough to have Preview for browsing PDFs, but Windows users still have to rely on Acrobat Reader. And, by many accounts, the latest version of Acrobat Reader wasn’t much improvement on the last one. In particular, it tends to load much more slowly.
In an effort to reverse that trend, Darrell Norton figured out that much of the slow-down is due to all the plug-ins that Acrobat Reader loads at startup. And he discovered that by moving a few files around, Acrobat Reader loads faster since it only load the plug-ins when it needs them:
- Go to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader (replace C if you installed on another drive, like D or E).
- Move all files [and subdirectories] from the “plug_ins” folder to the “Optional” folder.
- You’re done.
You can always leave a few plugins in the “plug_ins” folder if you still want them to load at startup (maybe you use search often, for instance). In any case, I tried this on my box and Acrobat Reader does seem to load a little more quickly. And I’m guessing that speedups may be even more noticable on other systems — with 768 MB RAM in this box, just about all my apps are cached after I load them the first time.
Amazing speedup! I’d noticed Mozillazine posts about speeding it up, but I’d assumed they dealt with some Mozilla file that I’d have to edit/dele (every time I downloaded a new Firefox nightly). Files that took 10 seconds to load now load in under 2. Thanks for the great tip!
Awesome.. Thanks for the information.