I have Acrobat 7.0 Standard (7.1.0) running on my couple-year-old, 
pretty much vanilla MacBook with original 1 GHz memory -- and it's by 
far the most painfully slow in starting up, in opening files, and most 
of all in shutting down, compared to any of the numerous other apps that 
I use.  Other Adobe apps (Illustrator, Photoshop Elements) are also 
somewhat slow to Open and Close, but Acrobat is really bad.  None of 
them seem to be particularly slow in doing tasks once they're running -- 
but maybe I'm not pushing them very hard.

Does anyone have any feel for whether buying the latest versions of 
these apps would get rid of this problem?  Or, installing more memory?  
Or any other suggestions?

In article <siegman-5CFCE9.18512325092009@news.stanford.edu>, AES
<siegman@stanford.edu> wrote:

> I have Acrobat 7.0 Standard (7.1.0) running on my couple-year-old, 
> pretty much vanilla MacBook with original 1 GHz memory -- and it's by 
> far the most painfully slow in starting up, in opening files, and most 
> of all in shutting down, compared to any of the numerous other apps that 
> I use.  Other Adobe apps (Illustrator, Photoshop Elements) are also 
> somewhat slow to Open and Close, but Acrobat is really bad.  None of 
> them seem to be particularly slow in doing tasks once they're running -- 
> but maybe I'm not pushing them very hard.
> 
> Does anyone have any feel for whether buying the latest versions of 
> these apps would get rid of this problem?  Or, installing more memory?  
> Or any other suggestions?

Memory, first and foremost. Max that puppy.

Also, make sure you have drive space free for scratch space.

Adobe apps want lots of both.

But if it's any consolation, I'm running Adobe Creative Suite 3 and 4,
and launching /shutdown is PAINFULLY slow in all of the apps.
Painfully.

InDesign is the worst. Acrobat is second.

AES <siegman@stanford.edu> wrote:

> I have Acrobat 7.0 Standard (7.1.0) running on my couple-year-old,
> pretty much vanilla MacBook with original 1 GHz memory -- and it's
> by far the most painfully slow in starting up, in opening files,
> and most of all in shutting down, compared to any of the numerous
> other apps that I use.  Other Adobe apps (Illustrator, Photoshop
> Elements) are also somewhat slow to Open and Close, but Acrobat is
> really bad.  None of them seem to be particularly slow in doing
> tasks once they're running -- but maybe I'm not pushing them very
> hard. 
> 
> Does anyone have any feel for whether buying the latest versions
> of these apps would get rid of this problem?  Or, installing more
> memory?  Or any other suggestions?

One other suggestion: Disable unnecessary plugins. This can make 
Acrobat launch a *lot* faster. That is, create a folder named "plugins-
disabled" or similar and move plugins from Acrobat's plugins folder to 
this to disable (inside the app package).

Some clues as to what to do here - mostly PC-centric and for the Reader 
version 6 but it will still apply to Acrobat 7 Standard for the Mac 
(Mac instructions included). 
<http://oreilly.com/pub/h/2347>

-- 
dee