New Adobe Acrobat Reader
Adobe has released version 7 of Acrobat reader. It requires Windows 2000 with at least service pack 2 (you should be on service pack 4) or Windows XP. Do not download it for earlier versions of Windows. It is huge, requiring 90 Megabytes of hard drive space.
New Features
- Loads faster. I can open new PDF files much quicker now.
- Better search features
- If the options were enabled when it was made, then you have some collaboration options even with just the reader. You can comment on, review and markup enabled pdf documents.
- Some improvements in form filling
The Bad
- I had trouble with the install. It locked my entire system on reboot. I disabled their "speed launcher" with WinPatrol in safe mode and rebooted fine. Then repaired the installation and disabled both speed launchers. There is no help I could find in either the help file or the website support or the forums for disabling the stupid speed launch. Their startup options do not allow disabling it. It launches much faster even without the speed launch. It seems to work fine if you use WinPatrol or some other tool to disable the speed launch, which of course, I recommend.
Recommendation
Because it launches so much faster, I prefer version 7. Because of it's idiotically loading partially at Windows startup, and having no way I could find to disable that from within the program, I cannot recommend it. However, you can easily disable this partial load at startup with WinPatrol or whatever you use to manage your startup programs.
After reviewing the problems in forums, it doesn't seem to me that the benefits are worth the risk.