Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Adobe finds a new way to annoy me

I broke down and bought Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.0 several weeks back.  I had been using Acrobat 5.0 which was perfectly fine for creating PDFs, but editing existing PDFs was getting more difficult as more are created either with Acrobat 6 or 7, or other tools which apparently support features not in Acrobat 5.

So I upgraded.

This morning Acrobat prompts me to allow it to run a critical updates task while I'm reading my 2005 expense report from AMEX. I click ok.

It whirs for a bit.  Then asks me again to confirm an upgrade to 7.0.7.  I click ok.

It whirs for a bit and starts downloading.  It kicks off the Windows Installer which also starts running.  My system....is.....slowing....down.  Windows Installer requests permission to upgrade Acrobat to 7.0.7.  I click ok.

At no time do any of these tasks say Oh, by the way, happen to have the install CD inserted in the computer at this moment?. Hell, I don't even have a CD drive attached to the computer right now.

So, of course I reach a point where everything stops and asks for the CD to be installed. This is so that Adobe, which has already used product activation to verify that you have a legitimate copy of the software, can re-verify that you have a legitimate copy of the software because you have a physical CD. I realize that what I should do is just create a CD image and mount it, disk space is that cheap these days.

So, I cancel out of all of the stupid windows now littering my screen and instead of taking the time to dig out the CD (for the amount of $$$ the package costs, I lock the CD up in my firesafe) and instead blog about it here.

e.p.c. posted this at 16:21 GMT on 21-Feb-2006 .

Slightly acerbic and eccentric dog walker who masquerades as a web developer and occasional CTO.

Spent five years running the technology side of the circus known as www.ibm.com.

More about me here.

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