should acrobat reader take 40 sec to load?

Factual Questions
1

I have a new XP system (1.7 MHz) and have installed acrobat reader 5.1. It takes 40 sec upon clicking even a small document to load up acrobat (for 38 sec it just seems to be doing nothing) and display the page. I have reinstalled it but that makes no difference. Once one document is up, the others can be loaded up fast.

Is acrobat just a load of bloatware, or is there anything I can do to speed it up? It is very annoying as I have to read a lot of pdf files. OK I can leave acrobat running in the background, but often I close the program instead of the document by mistake.

2

That sounds wrong. I just opened an 8mb .pdf file and it took 14 seconds on my ancient 400MHz K6 running XP Pro.

Are the .pdf files just monsters in size or colors/graphics? How fast does it load without opening a document at the same time?

3

I have found the problem but don’t know how to solve it. Using the task manager as acrobat loads up I find that Macaffees virus shield kicks in for 30 seconds or so, hogging all the systems resources. I have looked under its properties, but it shouldn’t activate when opening a file, only when downloading etc. Any ideas?

4

Ok I disabled Macafees background scanning which seemed to be the problem. Though my system is now not quite as secure it may be a lot faster

5

Rather than disabling background scanning entirely you can select the option to just scan program files only. I have McAfee setup this way and Acrobat reader loads fairly quickly. Perhaps your delay is caused by virus scanning the pdf document.

6

The hamsters had a little hickup, so I’m posting again to make sure that scm1001 sees my reply above since the thread didn’t get bumped by my post.

7

Oh, and Acrobat is a load of bloatware. 40 seconds is way long, but it does take a long-ass time to load.

8

Mine did the same thing. It’s a busted binary of necessary file somewhere. I had to scrub out the Acrobat install and re-install and it went away.

9

I should probably point out that newer revisions of PDF have the theoretical possibility of including ACTIONS/executable data in addition to mere document data.
While I don’t know if I’d put up with 40 second load times myself, I would bear in mind that it should be possible to write a virus in PDF format.

10

Have to point out here that Acrobat Reader can very well be bloatware, but if it takes long time to load, there’s some problem in your system. In all computers I use Acrobat is really fast program. Even with 600MHz Duron it loads up under 3 sec when clicking a 20MB .pdf-file. If it gets longer, see how many tasks are running, and how much memory is left.

11

You should turn off the virus guard. They hog up memory and waste cpu cycles, slowing every process down considerably - even on fast computers.

Secure your system by using a firewall, and selectively scanning questionable files right before opening them. And try not to use Outlook.

12

There’s a problem with memory allocation in XP SP1, see here. Adobe uses lots of RAM, so I imagine this could be the case. Check it out.

13

I have Macafee 4.51 and doesn’t seem to ahve that option. . E.g under system scan it just has Scan (inbound and outbound files); scan floppies on (access, shutdown) What to scan (default files, all files, user specified files, compressed files, network drives). .What is odd is that other computers in my group set up with similar configurations don’t do this. may be I have installed something else which is interfering

14

Problem solved. Under user specified files I deleted the option to scan pdf files. Now it opens in an unimpressive but OK 5 seconds. It seemed to have a problem scanning pdf files?

15

Cool!

I’m no expert, but I think that virus scanners work pretty quickly on executable files but take much longer for text and similar type files.