Speeding up load time for Adobe Acrobat Reader

[Roundabout]

I thought I'd pass this along, having been frustrated with the time it takes to load and start up the Acrobat Reader, found this in a magazine and it works quite well.

Acrobat is slow to load because it loads a ton of plugins when it starts. If you watch the splash screen you will see them flip past. Most people only need a handful of these plugins. If you'd like to load Acrobat faster, follow these simple instructions:

1. Launch windows explorer.
2. Navigate to the Program Files folder, usually C:\Program Files
3. Below this, navigate to Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader
4. In the right-hand pane, find the folder named plug_ins
5. Right-click it and choose rename, changing it to plug_in_NOT
6. Create a new folder named plug_ins
7. From the plug_ins_NOT folder, copy (don't move) these three files to the new plug_ins folder: EWH32.api, printme.api, and search.api

That's all you need to do. Next time you load a PDF file, only these three plugins will load, and you should notice a signifigant speed improvement. If you need to read encrypted PDF's or if for any other reason you want to undo the change, just delete the plug_ins folder and rename the plug_ins_NOT folder back to plug_ins.

Worked great for me. Defininte improvement in the load time.

[redwudz]

Sounds like a good idea. I liked the older versions of Acrobat because the load time of 6.x was getting on my nerves. But Acrobat wants to uprade all the time with the older versions. Thanks.

[butler1]

Wow, works great.

The loading time of that was really starting to get annoying, now it loads in a second.

I learned today a way to speed up the performence of a windows xp computer, at the expense of the nice gui stuff. Just go to the control panel->system->advanced->settings->ajust for best performence. If you want to select what it changes you can too. It really sped up my system, even though its a fast system.

Also, if you are looking to speed up your computer and loading speed, start->run->type "msconfig" & enter->startup and uncheck anything you don't need to run when you start you'r computer.

[rallynavvie]

Unfortunately for the full version this will also disable all your plug-ins making them unusable, though that is a trick I used once upon a time when I only had the reader. One other way to speed up load times is to enable DLL caching in Windows. In fact then all the Adobe apps will load faster the second time.

[Roundabout]

rallynavvie,

Proabably true, for those lucky enough to have the full version of Acrobat (unlike me)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't enabling the DLL caching still require you to wait forever the first time for everything to load? In a lot of cases, I may only open the reader once during an online session, so it wouldn't help me much (enabling caching) if that's true. Seems like it's easier not to load plugins that you don't need in the first place, to speed it up.

Anyway, I'm more likely to click on a link that opens a PDF file than I was before, because I don't have to wait forever for the reader to open. Simple solution. Glad it helped a few people.