Adobe Steal another Half an Hour of My Life

As I get older, I realise that time is becoming more precious to me. The number of hours left to me is not so huge that I can just squander them on wasted effort. Or have them taken from me.

Adobe Reader has just stolen half an hour of my time. All I wanted to do was read a document and then print it. Without being asked it went on line, found some updates, downloaded 30 MBytes of stuff, spent fifteen minutes installing this, rebooted my machine and then spent another five minutes rattling the disk drive.

Net loss to me, half an hour of my time.

Now, the Adobe reader is a program that lets me read documents. That's all. It does not control a heart-lung machine, fly a plane or operate a nuclear reactor. What can be so wrong with it that it requires 30 MBytes (more space than the original Windows 95 installer) to sort out? I know that the program is free, and so I probably can't complain. But this kind of behaviour means that I would be unlikely to pay for it anyway.

And now I've wasted another ten minutes moaning about the 30 minutes I lost. Bah.

Comments

[Chris Slatt]

Time to FoxIt http://www.foxitsoftware.com/

Free, fast, stays out of the way.

[Chris Davies]

Another Chris and another vote for FoxIt.

[John Smith]

Another vote for Foxit, I use it campus wide at the school, bined Adobe due to its bloated nature.