I prefer Foxit, too, and use it as my default PDF reader.
However, once in a blue moon something doesn't render correctly, so
Adobe Reader is needed.
Here is a direct link to a smaller installer:
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/7x/7.0/enu/AdbeRdr70_enu.exe
In fact, I learned about the above by reading from the following Weblog:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007183.html
December 28, 2004
get acrobat reader 7
I finally got around to upgrading to the Adobe Acrobat Reader version
7.0 (which was released about a week ago). It's amazingly fast compared
to 6.0. I highly recommend to all of you on Windows XP or Windows 2000
to upgrade to this newer version.
It's really fast. Seriously. It's fast. I used to dread clicking on PDF
links (I even installed the Target Alert plugin to warn me) because it
would take 10-20 seconds to start the reader and load even the smallest
PDF documents. With version 7, it's instantaneous.
If you decide to follow my lead and upgrade to this version, here are
some notes that should make your experience even better.
1. Don't download from the Adobe site or any other Web page. Go directly
to the Adobe FTP [
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/7x/7.0/enu/ ] and get the 12MB
package (unless you want the big fat package with the Yahoo Companion
and lots of other garbage.) The file you want is AdbeRdr70_enu.ex.
2. Version 7 installs a quickstart item in your Start folder. This isn't
at all necessary and the reader starts up blazingly fast without it so
do yourself and your RAM a favor and remove the "Adobe Reader Speed
Launch" from Start->All Programs->Startup.
3. Now, you'll probably notice a small banner ad in the top right
corner. To remove that, just go to Edit->Preferences->Startup and
uncheck the item labeled "Show messages and automatically update".
4. If you see a small Yahoo button on the toolbar, you can remove it by
right-clicking and unchecking the "Search the Internet" item.
5. One downside is that when you open a PDF link in your browser,
Acroread.exe stays in memory. You can kill the process or start and exit
the full app to pull it from memory. If that's too much of a pain, I
recommend doing what I did which is to just tell Acrobat to launch the
full app rather than the browser plugin. To do this, start Acrobat
Reader, go to Edit->Preferences->Internet and uncheck the box labeled
"Display PDF in browser". This solves the in memory problem and I think
makes for a generally better user experience.
6. If the speed improvements with this upgrade aren't enough for you (it
really is fast, trust me) then you can make even more performance
improvements by moving unused Acrobat Reader plugins. To do this, go to
your install directory, probably something like C:\Program
Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader and just move the unnecessary plugins
from the \plug_ins directory to the \Optional directory. To learn more
about which plugins you may or may not need, you can check out
Help->About Adobe Plug-Ins, and get a pretty good description of each
one and what it does.
I hope these tips help. I've only had this installed for about a day so
it's possible that I've missed some problem or some other cool features.
If you've been using it longer and have any more information, please
post here.
Posted by asa at December 28, 2004 10:57 AM
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Expanding upon #6...
You can try the following "liposuction" on Adobe Reader:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=11041
Good luck!
