Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Not So Obvious To Adobe

I made the mistake of switching back to Adobe from Foxit a couple weeks ago. I shot off a couple emails to Adobe a second ago:

Hi,

I've had a frequent problem with your AdobeUpdater.exe - I think that's what it's called. Whenever I open a PDF, it automatically opens the Updater and never shuts it down. I don't think it needs to be said that an Updater should not run continuously in the background. It should check to see if there's an update - if there isn't, it should close out immediately. Perhaps the best thing would be to simply schedule a time to look up an update, as Apple does.

Suffice it to say that this has been extremely frustrating - I'm not even able to kill the task. In the end I've had to reboot the computer to get rid of the problem, which severely slows down my medium-speed laptop (1.3 Ghz, 512 MB of RAM).

I've uninstalled your program and won't be coming back to it (or any other program of yours) unless I get a reply on your thoughts about this problem. I'm sure others have similar problems. Updaters should not just run in the background.

Thanks,
*****

After loading up Adobe Reader 8 for another quick glance, I sent another one:



One more thing. Your Adobe Reader is one of the few programs which doesn't have general options under the Tools tab - where I would hope that I could find a way to adjust the Updater. I wish you would put those options back.

Anyway, now that I've pursued all my options, I'm done with this program. Hope you can get back to me on the deal and what you were thinking.

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An updater which quits if there are no updates? A general options area for the program? ARE THESE NOT OBVIOUS? And yet Adobe has a 23.94 BILLION market cap? (I know, I know. They don't care about the free programs. Yet people know them by their free programs.)

UPDATE: It's not uninstalling. Great... did I mention that it's 267 MB?

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