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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bad Experience Upgrading, But, After That, Fine., September 3, 2003
Since, for some unknown reason, Adobe doesn't offer a direct upgrade path from Acrobat 3 to Acrobat 6, I had to buy the Acrobat 5 Upgrade merely so I could qualify for a free upgrade to Acrobat 6. Not only is this silly of Adobe, it's also expensive. Instead of buying an Acrobat 6 package, sticking my old Acrobat 3 CD into the drive, and continuing on my way without further hassle or expense, I had to buy the Acrobat 5 upgrade, go to the Adobe website to find their customer support phone number, call them via their 800 number, get them copies of the receipt, pay a token shipping cost, and then install the new software. What's even worse is that I spent over six weeks trying to do that. Amazon got me the package immediately. But, I had to talk to Adobe (at their expense) five times. The first time was to find out that the upgrade existed and get the instructions for faxing the information to them. Supposedly, my fax never arrived. Then, I had to talk to them about that and get a snail-mail address. Supposedly, THAT package never arrived. Then, with my next call, I managed to get an email address to send the documents to. Again, supposedly, that never arrived. Finally, I talked to a person who had me re-fax just the receipt and my Acrobat 3 serial number. She called me back within a half an hour and we completed the whole process (confirmed my shipping address and got a credit card number for the shipping fee). Besides the hassle I had to go through, this upgrade must have cost Adobe a bundle in phone and support personnel costs. The free upgrade period from Acrobat 5 to 6 is over now, but Adobe really needs to come up with a better way for their old Acrobat 3 customers to upgrade.Now, regarding the Acrobat 6 program itself, I've only had one problem with a PDF on one web site: it wouldn't open in an IE window. I changed my Acrobat preferences to open it in a separate Acrobat window and it worked fine. I'm not a heavy user of Acrobat, so I'm not an expert, but I haven't noticed any performance issues. There are several complaints of scanner incompatability on Adobe's Support Newsgroups, but my scanner (an Epson 1200U) works just fine. I do wish Adobe would include some kind of document management capability in Acrobat. Right now, I'm using PaperPort 9 for document management and supplementing it with Acrobat. I had hoped to replace PaperPort with Acrobat, but there's just no way. Acrobat is for document distribution, not document management. If you want a paperless office (or home), you still need PaperPort. BTW: one person here mentions slowness in "Save As." "Save As" goes through the document and only saves current information. "Save" just dumps the whole thing back in its file (including anything that was deleted). That's why "Save As" will reduce file sizes and is probably why it's slower.
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