Saturday, September 11, 2010

Adobe ... The Master of Bloatware?


I just installed Adobe Acrobat Reader on my Windows 7 box... which according to Adobe supposedly takes up to 335MB when fully installed. The download itself is 53.5 megabytes.

Now I hate PDFs as much as the next person, but they are a fact of life. You just gotta deal with them sometimes. I used to use Foxit Reader (which uses a lot less disk space and likewise memory), but I got a really fast machine now so I thought I might as splurge and use the original.

Of course Adobe Reader is a real stinker like most other Adobe products. It runs a daemon in the background which wants to update itself more often than my Antivirus software. Do PDFs really evolve that quickly that I need an update every week? No. It's just that the program, despite being so large, is about as secure as a pastrami sandwich guarding an open bank vault. And how can it take 335 megabytes to render a PDF when it only takes 1 megabyte to run the whole fucking space shuttle?

My Windows tip for the day is to run 'msconfig' and disable everything that says Adobe in there.

Some interesting facts:

1. The computer which runs the space shuttle really does only use 1 megabyte of RAM.

2. Windows 7 recommended storage space is 16 to 20 GB.

3. If this post interests you for some reason, I wrote an article on the difference between storage and memory on my EFL website English 4 IT.