Tuesday, April 16, 2013

While I'm thinking about it, or Airports pt II



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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