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How to make Adobe Reader 7.0 load faster

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Like most other techies, whenever I install Adobe’s Acrobat Reader I also uninstall most of the pointless plugins, to speed up its dog-slow startup process. If you want to learn more about speeding up Adobe Reader 6.0, just ask Tim or Chris or Greg or Omar or Kevin (“site:blogs.msdn.com adobe reader” is a wonderful search term!).

Now that the even-shinier Adobe Reader 7.0 is out (via Mike Gunderloy’s excellent Daily Grind), I thought I’d document my steps for optimizing this new version. So here’s what I just did on two of my machines:

  1. In Edit-Preferences, do the following:
    • General tab: turn off “Automatically save document changes”
    • Internet tab: turn off all three checkboxes
    • Page Display tab: turn on “CoolType”
    • Search tab: turn off “Enable fast find”
    • Startup tab: turn off “Show messages and automatically update”
  2. In View-Toolbars, turn off “Rotate view” and “Search the internet”. Under “Show button labels”, turn them all on so you can figure out what the heck those icons means.
  3. Fire up Windows Explorer and do the following:
    • Navigate to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\
    • Right-click to create a new subdirectory, and call it plugins_uninstalled
    • Move all the .api files from the plug_ins subdirectory to your new plugins_uninstalled subdirectory, except for AcroForm.api (for form-filling) and EScript.api (dependency of AcroForm.api).
  4. Finally, go to Start-Run-All Programs-Startup, and right-click and delete the “Adobe Reader Speed Launch” link that Adobe silently added to your startup process.

What, you wanted to actually know what all those plug-ins did so that you can make up your own mind? Move them back again, launch Acrobat Reader, and go to Help-About Adobe Plugins to learn what each plug-in does and what its dependencies are. Oh, and if you sped up Adobe 6.0 by removing some plugins, the update process will have left some subdirectories under C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\, so if you’re tidy-minded you can delete those too.

Of course, if all this seems like too much hard work, you can just wait – I’m sure the good folks over at AcroPDF.com will update their “PDF SpeedUp” freeware utility to work with v7.0 before too long  ( Update: Yep, they have - you can get it here )

Update: a couple of readers have suggested that most users will also want search functionality, in which case you can keep Search.api and Search5.api in your plug_ins directory.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 22, 2004
    How disgusting... so Acrobat 7 loads faster not because it's more efficent or anything, but merely because it loads it's 30+ meg bloated self into ram on bootup?

    Remind me to NEVER install Acrobat 7. I thought it was bad enough when Acrobat left itself memory resident after viewing a PDF frow within IE, but this takes the cake. There is much better use for this ram. Adobe is going to way of Real, now they just need to add in some annoyware that nags you that you are running the free version, oh and hide the free download on their website.

  • Anonymous
    December 22, 2004
    Thank you Jonathan, you were been very useful for me!

  • Anonymous
    December 22, 2004
    I'm still using Acrobat Reader 4 (I had to stop myself from typing "Acrof**k", which is how I generally refer to it in conversation), because as near as I can tell the only advantage to higher numbered versions is that they get slower, so you get less work done, so you're less likely to burn out.

  • Anonymous
    December 23, 2004
    » How To: Optimize Adobe Reader 7.0  InsideMicrosoft - part of the Blog News Channel

  • Anonymous
    December 30, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 31, 2004
    Ok, only tried on one machine, so take with a grain of salt, but...

    Remove, then re-reinstall Reader 7.0. Leave everything default. I noticed no difference in loading time even on a very large document. (Load up one of the Patterns and Practices from MS... 600-900 pages)

    Removing the plugins didn't seem to make a difference in memory footprint on loading speedup.

    The only place I noticed I difference is if you choose not to let it load the PDF in the browser, but put it stand-alone. It's actually slower if you don't uncheck all three options <grin> and, if you do have it display in the browser, unless it's hiding a process somehwere else, it only stays resident as long as the browser is open. When the browser is no longer displaying the page, it's memory footprint drops significantly, and once the browser is shutdown, it closes down Acrobat's process in about 3 minutes.

    So really, this is all unecessary, and doesn't give Adobe credit for actually getting it right this time.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2005
    Nice guys at AcroPDF.com released a new version of PDF SpeedUp just yestoday. PDF SpeedUp v1.42 http://www.acropdf.com/pdfsu.exe

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2005
    Thanks for the pointer to the new PDF SpeedUp

    In my experience, removing the plugins definitely makes a difference in cold-cache startup time. Are you sure you're not testing a "warm-cache" case. where the plugin DLLs are still hanging around in the NTFS file cache? Gotta make sure you reboot between tests to be sure :)

  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2005
    Yep. Cold boot. Reader 7.0 took about 5 seconds to start viewing http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/8/c/d8c02f31-64af-438c-a9f4-e31acb8e3333/Threats_Countermeasures.pdf. Actually, I'd just done a full Ghost restore so there was nothing in the cache.

    <shrug>With 6.0, Acrobat was a dog, PDF speedup was going to be necessary if we were going to continue to use PDFs for our clients. Now, the Acrobat Reader 7.0 defaults are fine by me and my boss. </shrug>

  • Anonymous
    January 14, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 15, 2005
    Just followed your instructions. First results are unbelievably fast! Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2005
    Hey ya, good work there, except you forgot to mention that, once you do all you kindly wrote, when you start Adobe it will go through another 20 seconds of 'installing this and then something else', and it manages to reinstall AcroForm, Annotations, ImageViewer, Multimedia, PictureTasks and VDKHome - which are all folders with some sort of rubbish in them or another.
    Sigh. Why are these people doing this to us?

  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2005
    calcula - that's because you moved everything out of the plugins directory, not just the .prc files :) Looks like Adobe Reader wants those six subdirectories so much that if you delete or move them, it recreates them!

  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2005
    ah yes, that sounds fair (well, in a matter of speaking...)
    however, the "Adobe Reader Speed Launch”too was back on my start-up menu this morning :(

  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2005
    Hmmm - time to give PDF Speedup from AcroPDF.com a try?

  • Anonymous
    July 08, 2005
    Link: Jonathan Hardwick : How to make Adobe Reader 7.0 load faster.

  • Anonymous
    August 24, 2005
    Dont know if this is still an "open" topic, but I have both Acrobat 7 (full) and the reader (also v. 7). The full version is slow to open files and when I go to change the default "opener" to the Reader (via Tools -> Folder Options -> File Types), it always reverts back to the "full" version to open files!
    How can I fix this???

  • Anonymous
    September 22, 2005
    You have recommended that "In Edit-Preferences, Internet tab: turn off all three checkboxes"
    I would suggest that you turn ON atleast the 'Display PDF in Browser' checkbox because some website try to display PDF and for better user experience it is always good that the PDF opens in the same window rather than in the Adobe Aapplication window sperately.

  • Anonymous
    October 15, 2005
    In Firefox, this procedure may cause you to lose your ability to open PDFs and get an error message. To fix go to tools->options->downloads->Select "PDF" filetype"->click on "change action" and browse to the reader file called AcroRd32.exe

  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2005
    that is awsome. thank you so much

  • Anonymous
    October 26, 2005
    > In Firefox, this procedure may cause you to >lose your ability to open PDFs and get an error >message. To fix go to >tools->options->downloads->Select "PDF" >filetype"->click on "change action" and browse >to the reader file called AcroRd32.exe
    In Firefox, you may choose to add and extension that allows you to choose what to do with PDF files. linky below. https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=636&application=firefox

  • Anonymous
    January 29, 2006
    I followed your advice, with amazing results.

    And I'm on a Mac!

    Cheers!

  • Anonymous
    February 12, 2006
    Thank you very much, it's going much faster.

  • Anonymous
    February 17, 2006
    Used the tweaks on my PC (WinME-with 5.0) and MAC iBook (OS X -with 7.0) really is faster loading up. Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2006

    Thank you very much Jonathan. It is really very miraculour for me. It just almost loads in a jiffy. Your protocol is very useful
    Thanks a lot

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2006
    Excellent! Slow startup and large footprint were the only reasons i didn't want Acrobat 7. Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2006
    Just wondering, if it's such a pain, why are any of you using V7 anyway?
    Wouldn't it be simpler to just stick with V4 or 5, and skip all the futzing? Unless of course, you enjoy futzing, which is fine if you're in the mood.

  • Anonymous
    May 06, 2006
    In case you're not into this much fuss and can tolerate a little worse rendering plus some glitches then you might want to take a look at Foxit Reader, a free PDF viewer. It works without an installer. Not too fascinating, but it can be a viable alternative if you're in a hurry.

    http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

  • Anonymous
    May 10, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 10, 2006
    Johnathan,

    You can also diable the buttons in a javascript file.

    I named mine adobe_config.js and put the following code in it.

    //This hides the Yahoo toolbarbutton.

    app.hideToolbarButton("AdobeOnline");

    app.hideToolbarButton("endAdobeOnlineGroup");

    app.hideMenuItem("Undo");

    app.hideMenuItem("Edit");

    app.hideToolbarButton("WebSearchView");

    //This hides the menu item View>Toolbars>Search the Internet

    app.hideMenuItem("ShowHideToolbarWebSearchView");

    app.hideToolbarButton("AcroSendMail:SendMail");

    app.hideToolbarButton("Save");

    app.hideToolbarButton("SaveFileAs");

    app.hideMenuItem("Prefs");

    app.hideToolbarButton("Hand");

    app.hideToolbarButton("Select");

    app.hideToolbarButton("SelectGraphics");

    app.hideToolbarButton("endSelectToolsGroup");

    app.hideToolbarButton("Tasks");

    app.hideToolbarButton("AdView");

    app.hideToolbarButton("ObjectData");

    app.hideMenuItem("OpnAsPDF");

    app.hideMenuItem("Import");

    app.hideMenuItem("Export");

    app.hideMenuItem("AcroForm:ExportFDF");

    app.hideMenuItem("DocSecurity");

    app.hideMenuItem("DocInfo");

    app.hideMenuItem("Prefs");


    Oh ya, and you place the file in Program Files/Adobe/Acrobat 7.0/Reader/Javascripts.

    I haven't found out how to disable the edit buttons yet, that was what I was looking for.

    Any comments or suggestions you can get a hold of me at
    edavis75@cox.net

    Thanks,
    Ed.

  • Anonymous
    June 23, 2006
    PingBack from http://graycrane.net/karenblog/?p=102

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    Documents look a little less nice now, but it's definitely worth the faster startup.

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2006
    According to Adobe:
    "Note: These files are only opened and closed; they are not executed in any way. The Speed Launcher process does not remain in your computer's memory; it quits as soon as these files have been opened and closed. "

    adobe.com/support/techdocs/331131.html

  • Anonymous
    August 08, 2006
    Do you know how to disable the spell check button in the acrobat 7 plug-in ? thx.

  • Anonymous
    August 23, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 27, 2006
    I downloaded that program to optimise and it worked like a charm.

  • Anonymous
    September 21, 2006
    Easy as pie. Uninstall. Go to Reg edit and clean out the adobe reader stuff if you are feeling adventurous, otherwise leave it alone (poor software practice of uninstall to leave all this behind, but hey its ADopey). Install Foxit Reader from foxitsoftware.com. Add the java console and PDF writer beta. Total size under 4 mgs. And you get a free beta pdf writer. Goodbye adobe, you have opened 10 instances and crashed me for the last time.

  • Anonymous
    August 23, 2008
    i need it to make my work very easy

  • Anonymous
    August 23, 2008
    i need it in my work it will make it so easy i wish that dobe reader 7 will be better than reader6

  • Anonymous
    August 23, 2008
    sunday August 24 2008 11:39 am i download that program to optimise and it worked like acharm .

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2009
    Foxit reader is the answer if you're really looking to load PDF files faster