Goodbye Adobe and Apple

By | September 13, 2007

or an Adobe Acrobat Reader alternative … OK, I admit it, I absolutely hate Acrobat Reader, it is the biggest load of shite I have installed on my PC. It is slow to load, slow to do just about anything, when it opens in your browser you know you can probably kiss your browser session goodbye, then there is the sheer size of the monster, 33Mb download. On top of that it installs an update agent that on my Vista machine goes to 50% CPU and stays there every time it runs until I kill it. So, this is basically a piece of software that people install because they believe they have to and that there is no alternative, well I have good news for you.

But before we look at hat, a few more lessons from the masters of bloatware on how not to distribute software. At one stage and maybe it's not like this any more but anyway, if you had 7.0 installed and you wanted to
upgrade to say 7.3, well it's 7.1, then 7.2, then 7.3 etc etc what a
bunch of tossers ! and then there is the little thing of the installer,
this is the SLOWEST installer in the known universe, try installing 7.0
on a PIII it takes about 15 minutes to do whatever it is it does when
you double click on it (they call it "optimising" or some such stupid thing), then you get to wait through the install
process. Plus, yopu also get at no extra cost the copy function that works once every
three times you use it ! select text, right click, copy, more often not you get an error, try the same thing a few times and eventually it will work, this is still stuffed even in version 8 ! So what to use ?

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

From their web site  "Overview – Foxit Reader is a free PDF
document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 2.1 M download
size), breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set. Foxit Reader
supports Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Its core function is compatible with
PDF Standard 1.7."

Folks this a 2Mb download,
free for use in non commercial environments and works like a charm. The first
time I showed this to someone at work opening a 100 page PDF in well under a second
and page scrolling at light speed they couldn't believe what they were seeing.

Need to create PDF's ?

I highly recommend this,I have been using for over a year now, it has never missed a beat, it is free and installs as a printer.

http://www.primopdf.com/
 

Media Player, Itunes Alternative. 

While you are at it, if you you don't really care too much for Windows Media Player and Itunes then try this. 

http://www.mediamonkey.com/

There is a free version which I will admit is a tad limited but this
is one really nice media player that does a lot of things the others don't
do. for example try moving back and forwards in a song, you have to do it to see what I mean, this is really well done the way it drops then brings the sound level back up. It is certainly worth a try, once again a small download, just
under 5mb that leaves Itunes for dead. I stuck with Itunes for a while
because it was the lesser of 2 evils, Media Player is OK but has it's
quirks, both are slugs when it comes to performance. Itunes however does do a few things quite well like renaming and rearranging all your files though you don't have a lot of control over how this is done, MediaMonkey does this really well with full control over naming etc. Itunes however is totally brain-dead if you just dump new files in your library  folder, it just won't pick them up, you have to import them. The scan folders function on Media Player works sometimes then other times just totally ignore new files, this function in the paid version of MediaMonkey works flawlessly.

MediaMonkey is
very snappy even with very very large media libraries. At least try it,
nothing to lose.

 

 

 

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