Why does it take Acrobat 15 minutes to produce the same pdf file that OpenOffice.org produces in 15 seconds? Is it because I’m using Acrobat 5, or because Acrobat is just retarded? Granted… the document is huge… but I can’t do anything while it’s working. My entire system is consumed by Acrobat.

Is your Adobe Acrobat Reader too slow??? Mine was. Until I figured out that the reason it was slow was because it had to load a zillion stupid and mostly worthless plugins. I found out that you can solve this problem by moving all the unnecessary plugins from the “plug_ins” directory to the “Optional” directory in the “Reader” path (C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 8.0\Reader).

Here is what I left in my plug_ins directory:

[Update] I attempted to open a password protected PDF, and my Adobe reader went to lunch. So… after a few failed attempts at restoring whatever plugin is required to open password protected files, I downloaded foxit reader and removed Adobe’s. Life is so much better now.