David M Williams
Sunday, 30 November 2008 08:39
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 4
Adobe Acrobat
To kick off, what’s with this acrotray.exe? It belongs to the Adobe Acrobat family. It doesn’t matter if you have the full product which creates PDF files, or just the reader which displays them, you end up with acrotray.exe always running.
Now, you’d think something with the word “tray” in its name would show up in the system tray, near the computer’s clock but not in this case. In fact, acrotray.exe doesn’t have any window or any user interface. It’s not anything that benefits the user directly – it’s not like it offers configuration items, for instance – but is solely used to speed up the loading of Adobe Acrobat when you choose to use it.
Let’s get real here! We’re talking about a document viewer! How freaking big does it really have to be? According to Adobe it has to be
BIG. Perhaps I should be fair: Adobe Acrobat can do a lot of stuff. It will let you fill in forms, verify digital signatures and do all sorts of stuff ... which 80% of people probably don’t do regularly or maybe never do!
Firing up Adobe Acrobat you see it flashing lines of text telling you all the plug-ins it is loading. All of which takes time.
Let’s cut these down. It turns out there’s an “Optional” folder and if you
move the plug-ins you don’t care about into this folder they won’t load when Acrobat starts up! Oh, they’ll still be available for use, just they’ll load on demand not on startup. Immediately Acrobat starts up faster. Yet, why wasn’t an interface provided in the first place to manage the plug-ins?
Back to acrotray.exe, press the Windows Key + R to call up a “run” box, type regedit and press enter. Navigate to
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.
Everything listed here starts when your computer starts. We’ll return to this registry area several times.
For now, remove the “Adobe Assistant” key. You’ll see its value is the path to acrotray.exe. Just click it once to select, press delete, confirm and you’re done. It’ll no longer steal CPU and RAM just to feed its gluttonous badly programmed ways.
Of course, if you only want to view simple plain old PDF files and you’re after something lean and mean, try the free offerings from
CutePDF and
Foxit Software.
Keep reading for Apple iTunes (page 3) and Logitech, Google and Java (page 4.)
CONTINUED
