Tech Tip: Make Acrobat Load Faster

While Adobe Acrobat Reader has become kind of a lingua franca for placing non-HTML and non-XML documents on the Web for access by the public, it's always bothered me how long it takes for the Acrobat Reader module to load, even on a reasonably fast machine.

I finally installed a nifty utility which signficantly speeds up the loading process. It comes from a British company named TNK-Bootblock (http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/), and it's called Adobe Reader Speedup. I've installed it on a number of machines, and it's significantly improved loading performance on all of them (though the improvement was particularly noticeable on the slower systems).

Downloads of the freeware product are available from the usual places, but I got mine from Major Geeks (http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4139.html).

It's pretty nifty. The program only needs to be run once. After that, Acrobat Reader loads much faster whenever you click on a link to a PDF document.

It appears to be clean, too. No post-installation problems were reported by NAV, Ad-Aware, or Spybot Search and Destroy.