Okay, so I just tried to down­load Acro­bat Reader 7. I’ve got no rea­son to pay for the full prod­uct, as free alter­na­tives suf­fice for all my PDF cre­ation needs… maybe Abobe is get­ting upset and decid­ing to trash what was pre­vi­ously the best cross-platform doc­u­ment shar­ing for­mat ever.

Well, what­ever. I’m still using PDF doc­u­ments, and prob­a­bly will be for a while, but I’m going to rant about it any­way. So there’s an installer, right? Okay. Pre­ferred method of instal­la­tion: Evil Adobe Down­load man­ager. Option for nor­mal down­load? Yup. Why didn’t I use it? Call me stu­pid or some­thing… I’ll get to exactly why.

So last week some time I was at Steve’s office, and he said that Acro­bat Reader 7 is loads faster than 6. I’m not sure if I started danc­ing then and there, but it was good to hear. Today, I bother to do some­thing about it on this lap­top (which, inci­den­tally, has just had a long-overdue RAM upgrade, and still loads Acro­bat 6 like crap), which involved going to the Adobe web­site and fol­low­ing the links, then fill­ing out three drop­down menus to present me with more choices.

Lan­guage: Eng­lish.
Oper­at­ing Sys­tem: Win­dows ME
Con­nec­tion: Broadband

Won­der­ful, it’s offer­ing to let me down­load Adobe Reader 6. Again. I know I’m run­ning Win­dows ME and that’s a crime against human­ity. Right now, I’d argue that Adobe down­load soft­ware and inter­nal pol­icy is a crime against human­ity. Not only would it offer to let me down­load an old ver­sion of soft­ware, I also had my choice of spy­ware rid­den tool­bars and some crappy photo man­age­ment soft­ware which they’re pimp­ing like it’s actu­ally mak­ing them money. Scary, no? The first hit is always free… no, I’m not a cynic. Never.

Josh trots off to Download.com to try and grab the lat­est Reader “ille­gally”, just for the hell of it, to see if it’ll work on this com­puter. Download.com, searches, finds Acro­bat Reader, down­loads Acro­bat Reader, dis­cov­ers it’s actu­ally a crappy down­load stub (hey, I’m on snappy cable here, I don’t *do* check­ing file sizes!), which then pro­ceeds to down­load (unan­nounced) three dif­fer­ent pieces of soft­ware. “Ummmm.”

It fin­ishes down­load­ing these mys­te­ri­ous three com­po­nents. Installer one launches. Yahoo! Tool­bar? No thanks. Really, no thanks. No, really, take that tool­bar away from me before I do some­thing unto­ward with it. Crappy Adobe Photo man­age­ment dru… err… soft­ware? No thanks. Really, no thanks. If I cared that much for your crappy soft­ware, I’d ask for it. As it stands, I’m per­fectly happy with the most excel­lent Irfan­view on Win­dows, and mis­cel­la­neous web-based photo man­age­ment applications.

FINALLY. This is the part where I have the Acro­bat installer itself run. But no. “I don’t like your Oper­at­ing Sys­tem, you anti-consumerist pig. Go grov­el­ling to our bud­dies Microsoft and upgrade, quick smart. And buy some new hard­ware from some ven­dor that Microsoft approved so your new OS will run, okay? That’s right. In the mean­while, we’ll pun­ish you by mak­ing our reader soft­ware con­tinue to run just as slow on your crappy four-year-old OS.”

Rec­om­men­da­tion: Use plain text, or (if it’s absolutely nec­es­sary) valid (X)HTML, to send me doc­u­ments. I’ll receive them in a bet­ter mood. (This com­ment endures only until I move into the new house, get my Linux desk­top back, and can resume read­ing Adobe PDF files with­out even need­ing to see their prod­uct name. Ahh, Open Source.)