Installed here, and it certainly loads faster. It takes about 2 seconds on my WinXP Pro SP3 machine with a P4 CPU at 3.11ghz and a gig of RAM.
Adobe still loads their speedup utility on startup from the Local Machine registry hive. Disable that (which I haven't gotten around to doing for a test), and I expect that speed to drop a good deal.
On launch, Adobe Reader 9 uses 85MB of virtual memory, with a 27MB Working Set size (as reported by
Sysinternal's Process Explorer.) Loading a random PDF (James Moffat's "Complexity Theory and Network Centric Warfare" kicks the Virtual size up to 117MB, and drops the Working Set size down to 2.5MB.
There have been tricks you could use to speed up Adobe Reader loading for years. Under old versions like Adobe 6, a good chunk of the startup time was the reader loading various plugins to support particular functionality. You could go into the reader plugins directory and remove or rename the ones you didn't need to speed loading.
One trick I still use was introduced in Adobe 7. When you are surfing the web, and you find a site with a PDF file you want to read, your browser will by default load the reader as a plug in and display it for you in a browser window or tab. This was a PITA: among other things, once loaded, the reader process stayed in memory. Closing the browser window or tab, or exiting the browser entirely didn't remove it. On slower machines with limited memory, this could be a problem.
Adobe 7 introduced a preference to control this. Under Edit/Preferences/Internet,
uncheck Display PDF in browser. This makes the browser call Adobe Reader as an external program instead of loading it as a plugin. Exit the reader, and the process terminates and is removed from memory.
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Dennis