While I’m about it, I’m going to mention my disdain for PDF
Complete and Adobe Reader all in the same group. PDF Complete tries to handle what Adobe
doesn’t do by creating a lightweight, easy to use and operate PDF reader
program. Great concept, and if the
execution was as good as the idea, then it would be perfect. But it’s not.
While I have little to do, stuck in an airport, I’m catching
up on reading amongst other things. I
rarely have time in the day or night to work on anything other than what I’ve
got in front of me. Studying? Just forget about that most of the time. But I’m in an airport for the next hour,
killing time and catching up. This trip
to Tampa is working vacation for me. I’m
technically flying out to go through a class and pass a certification
test. But most of what I’m studying I’ve
been doing for the past year. This is
not a lot of new stuff to learn, just refinements in what I already know.
As I was saying, I’ve been catching up on my reading, and a
bunch of what I read is in PDF format.
So that means I need a PDF reader to handle that document. It would be nice if the PDF program would
remember my place without hours of work.
Hit a “remember my place” button or “dog-ear this page” button. Something like that. But I’ve never found that. So I go with the other option. And the other option is to write down what
the PDF says the page is. Here’s where
PDF complete fails me.
Let’s say I’m reading a 2,000 page book. I read for twenty or thirty minutes, and then
I write down the page I’m on in a text document and I exit the reader. Next time I want to read that book, I pull up
my text document with my “dog-ear”, and I open the file. Once it’s open, I type that page number into
the page location and press the enter key.
Within seconds, I’m back to where I finished. Except I’m not. With PDF Complete, that page number never
updates once I continue reading. So I
end up reading the same thing over and over.
I did that at least twice before I uninstalled PDF Complete and installed
Adobe Reader XI.
Adobe Reader has always been a buggy, bloated, painful to
operate program. It doesn’t play with
other programs and has always had a problem with memory leaks. It’s like whoever wrote the memory free/release
structure for Adobe Reader never checked it to make sure it was releasing everything
and closing the way it was supposed to.
Combine that with the constant updates, and you’ve got a generally
crappy program.
Other thought… Adobe
acknowledges their product is such a delivery method for viri and malware the
bundle anti-x tools with the program.
What a piece of crap. I guess
that’s my new method for determining how buggy a program is… what has it been
bundled with?
While I’m discussing viri and malware, there are generally
three programs you need. R-Kill, Avira,
and Malware Bytes. Malware Bytes the
trailer though, and often it won’t find anything. But R-Kill and Avira will solve 95% of all
issues. And from a Windows user
perspective, I would recommend you have at least two accounts on your
computer. Both can be administrators. That part is irrelevant. What you essentially need is a stable account
that hasn’t been jacked with in a long time so when the virus takes over your
computer you can get rid of it.
There was one computer that had issues. The virus had changed all the operating
system links, so Windows didn’t know an .exe file was supposed execute things.
Every extension had been changed.
Luckily, this was a domain user and they had a local computer account on
that computer. So what I did is put
R-Kill in the “all users” startup folder, logged off as the domain user, logged
on as the local user, and R-Kill fired off because it was a separate
account. R-Kill fixed the file
extensions so I could install Avira and clean the computer.
Okay, enough rambling from this airport, as I’m about to
board and head for the next airport.
There is a several hour layover at the next one, so I’ll probably fill
up another couple of pages. Maybe by the
end, I’ll have a couple of weeks of updates so my blog actually has activity.
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