How to increase the launch speed of Adobe Acrobat Reader

Posted on December 27, 2007 at 7:12 am

Make sure to read other posts from the PDF Reader/Viewers series!

  1. Foxit – The alternative to bloated Adobe Reader
  2. Free PDF viewer and reader that’s better than Foxit viewer
  3. How to increase the launch speed of Adobe Acrobat Reader

Doesn’t it bother you that all Adobe products, like Acrobat Reader take like 15 minutes to load? I’ve replaced Acrobat Reader with Foxit Reader and PDF-XChange Viewer because both of these launch so much faster! And don’t even get me started on how slowly Adobe Photoshop loads! And when you watch the startup splash screens, it seems like their are a millions different modules and plug-ins that keep loading.

Recently, however, I learned a cool trick whereby you can significantly increase the load speed of Adobe Acrobat Reader or the Standard and Professional versions also.

It’s actually quite a simple trick, yet made a huge difference in my load speed for Adobe Acrobat 6.0. It literally went from about 16 seconds to about 2 seconds! I was quite impressed. Here’s how it works: you simply need to disable all of the extra plugins that come with the Acrobat software. YES! That’s it!

And don’t worry, you probably won’t even miss 95% of the these plugins that come installed by default! I disabled ALL of the plugins and can’t even tell that anything is gone…YET. If anything does come up, I’ll be sure to mention it, but you’ll pretty much be safe removing everything!

Here’s how to disable the plugins to increase the launch speed of Adobe Acrobat:

  • First go to to the installation folder for Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is usually in this directory:C:\program files\adobe X.0\acrobat\reader\

    For my installation of Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Standard, the plugin directory was under this location:

    C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Acrobat\

  • You should see a folder called plug_ins or plugins or something very similar to that. Now move all of the files and folders from this folder to some backup folder somewhere else on the computer hard drive.

adobe acrobat

Remember, you want to MOVE the files out of this directory, not simply copy and paste them somewhere else. The plug_ins directory should be empty when you are finished. Luckily, most of the plugins are named appropriately, so if you find that something is missing, simply go into that directory and copy it back to the default location!

Now your Acrobat Reader should load as fast as Wordpad or Microsoft Word! In my tests, it was loading just as quickly as Foxit, so that’s pretty good news. Enjoy!

[tags]adobe acrobat, acrobat reader, acrobat reader speed, speed up acrobat reader, increase speed acrobat reader, launch speed adobe reader[/tags]

» Filed Under Computer Tips

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Comments

4 Responses to “How to increase the launch speed of Adobe Acrobat Reader”

  1. PC said on : December 27th, 2007 at 11:40 am

    I m always bothered with the launching speed.

    Thanks for the post. It helped me a lot.


  2. akishore said on : December 28th, 2007 at 4:35 pm

    Hi PC, yeah it definitely made Adobe Acrobat load like a hundred times faster! I’m glad it helped!


  3. Syahid A. said on : January 2nd, 2008 at 9:38 am

    Nice tip. Btw, faster alternatives do exist in the form of Foxit Reader and Adobe Acrobat Reader Lite.


  4. Karun said on : September 1st, 2008 at 1:50 pm

    Great tip man. It really worked. speed was like awesome and i couldnot have imagined speed like that.


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