Customer Reviews

Adobe Acrobat Standard 8.0 - Old Version

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Please see reviews of the previous version 7.0. The Adobe activation process can cause a lot of continuing problems for legitimate users of this software. Too bad such good software is hampered by such a process. Being in the software business, I don't mind companies worrying about piracy and taking some measures but this is a bit too much. You might need to allow the software to access the internet regularly to keep your activation (and not bother you with notices of reactivation) but that also means you open it for Adobe to do their push marketing into their software. I have used Adobe products for over 15 years and have always liked them. Too bad, they have lost the customer focus in their rage for software piracy and greed for intrusive marketing.

I did some research and found a nice product, that is essentially Acrobat Standard Edition called CutePDF Professional. Price was only $50 and comes with a form filler product to enter/save data in PDF forms ($30 if you only want their form filler product). Can also edit PDF form fields, merge PDF's, and change PDF page odering (all handy for when I scan stuff to PDF and find out after the scan I messed up one page, I can fix this now!). This is the basic funcitonality I needed and was bummed that I thought I had to drop a few hundred dollars on Acrobat Standard Edition to do this. I was a hairs breath from buying Standard Edition but found CutePDF with a little web searching while looking for used copies of Standard edition. Only thing I would "like" that it doesn't do is edit existing text in a PDF (not text form fields, those are fine), but then again, you need Acrobat Professional to do that anyway, and that's very expensive. Hopefully, CutePDF wil motivate Adobe to create another Acrobat product category for we simple home users that need such basic functionality (especially saving forms) a few times a year but don't want to drop a few hundred dollars to get this. Yes, Reader can save forms IF the person sending you the form enabled it to allow Reader to save form data, but that's a pain, since that doesn't always happen, and forms are passed along or downloaded and this is an impossibility sometimes. They should make a Reader that allows saving forms after entering the form data for say a price of $40. I would have bought that in a second. The lack of this product led me to find CutePDF. By the way, the $50 price for CutePDF Pro appears to be a special price offer (it's normally $90), but form filler appears to have a standard price of $30.

This is the worst software application that I have ever purchased. It takes an average of three seconds to page up or down and an average of one second per line when scrolling through a document. It is this slow regardless of the size of the document. It is not my computer, because version 7.0 worked perfectly. My computer has a 2.6GHz processor and 1Gbyte of memory. Don't believe their marketing propaganda which claims that they have improved the operating speed over the 7.0 version. Some are blaming the performance problems on their licensing processes that are constantly running in the background. If you don't need the added features in this product stick with the free PDF readers that are available on the Internet such as Foxit.

I installed Adobe 8.0 at the request of a client in order to view secure docments on-line. Two serious problems were caused by this: 1) Window 2000 Outlook runing under XP would crash after the Adobe reader was launched. Closing the reader and restarting Outlook would not always fix the problem. Often the computer would require a cold re-boot.
2). More serious, Adobe 8 installation corrupted my Agilent Technologies Genesys 8 and later (Eagleware) RF simulation software tools. This resulted in the Genesys simulator to fail to find the authentication file. Because the correlation between installing Adobe was not apparent considerable amount of time was lost on this project. Adobe also causes problems with OrCAD 15 license server.

I have currently un-installed Adobe 8 had to re-install and patch previously installed Microsoft and enginnering software tools.

Adobe has a habit of making sure their new products break their old ones, thus forcing you to upgrade. Try editing a pdf in Acrobat Professional v5.0 Seems to work... but you can't print it from any of the newer versions of the reader. Oops. And did you ever have the pdf writer? If so, you may have noticed that a fairly recent upgrade of the Reader disabled your installation of the writer. Hmmm... now why would that happen? Time to upgrade, I guess.

Do yourself a favor and find an alternative solution. Adobe wants more wallet share, and they're willing to do whatever it takes to get it.

My advice would be to not go to 8.0 as it is slower than anything I can ever remember. For a software so many people rely on you would think they would have noticed performance issues in development. The problem does not lie within my computer, I hear it from other people that have upgraded to 8.0 as well. I called Adobe about and they know of the slowness issue but for new users they will not give you a key to revert back to 7.0. If you can get 7.0 stick with it until they release an update. Adobe blew it big time with this one. I hope they release a fix soon.

The product came shipped in original packaging and was easy to install. The product is invasive by nature-integrating itself into most microsoft programs. This is good if you like having constant access to the program, but bad if you want a program to use a minimal amount of computing resources (which is my inclination).
The interface is intuitive and pretty easy to get used to. The program is not especially powerful, but has yet to entertain and gliches.
Not worth it if all you need to do is print to PDF (for that, use a freebie PDF creator). But if you need to assemble PDF packages, work with the bookmarks and add security; this gig is for you. (though not very cheap).

The product is pretty good IF you can get it to run on your vista machine. Just hope you dont have to talk with support, they will try to give you trial and error resolutions and then get off the phone not even knowing if it works. I have now called back 4 times and have waited 30 minutes each with no resolution.

Acrobat + vista= sucks!

Buyer beware! As Adobe and Microsoft wage WAR with each other regarding the Portable Document Format, the customer is at risk! In some cases, depending on the build, acrobat 8 will not even install properly on a Vista Machine. Both Adobe and Microsoft are aware of the problem, cannot fix it, and blame each other.

Perhaps the Vista service pack will fix this issue, otherwise, install it on an XP machine!

I use window vista and office 2007. The adobe 8 standard can be upgraded to 8.10 in order to create a PDF from office 2007. However I found that it is so unstable I can not use it every time. PDF is super but Adobe is not as good as its product.
Office 2007 has a add in program to create PDFs but this program does not work well especially when I produce figures and save in word 2007. It case super problem when I convert the word file to PDF. So I wish Microsoft can do something for it.