Or is Adobe Acrobat Reader the most sluggish application ever put together?
I've been working with several machines lately that have been upgraded to the latest (6.0) reader software. It is literally taking upwards of 30 to 40 seconds for the program to load - and this is on relatively new PC's!!! (800MHz, 512M RAM, WinXP) For something whose sole job is to render PDF files, that isn't just slow - it is flat-out unacceptable.
5.0/5.1 weren't much better, either. Easily 15 to 25 seconds load time. Aren't newer versions supposed to get better?
Glad I still have Acrobat 4.0 Reader installed at home. I refuse to upgrade - quite literally the reader software takes in the neighborhood of 5 seconds to load, and it is off to rendering the PDF file (a relatively painless task, I may add, in 4.0).
Bloatware sucks.
I've reported previously about our experiences with our new Time-Warner DVR box. It has now been nearly a month and a half since we picked up one, and I thought it was time for an update.
As I had reported in part 3, our viewing habits have certainly changed dramatically. I actually just tonight wanted to see a show, and actually watched it live - and found myself chafing through the commercials, anxious to move on to the next segment of the story. Never thought it would get like this so quickly, but it certainly has. We have also found ourselves "paring down" the show list that we were recording - we were simply recording too much, and it felt like a constant struggle just to watch everything it recorded - silly, since we don't have to, and yet the desire was very strong in both of us.
A downside that we never considered also came up recently. Before this box, we often would watch DVDs - collections of TV shows, movies, whatever. We realize now that with the box, we just simply aren't watching DVDs that much anymore. Coupling Season 2 came out - a show my wife loves - and she has only watched the first 4 episodes on the discs. The DVR simply has too much "TV goodness" for her to feel the need to look for something else to watch. It has hit me in the same way, with DVDs sitting and waiting to be watched for weeks at a time. It isn't a big deal, but feels almost like a drawback in some strange way.
I'm sure we will get the balance eventually.
< begin rant >
- Microsoft sucks.
- Microsoft servers suck.
- Microsoft Exchange really, really sucks.
- Why do I get paid good money to spend lots of time supporting Microsoft products?
- Oh, that's right:
- because they suck.
< end rant >