March 5, 2010

The Adobe Updater Is My New Favorite App…

TO HATE.

Those who use the newest of Adobe’s Creative Suites on old hardware (a 1Ghz PowerBook G4 for me) can sympathize I am sure.

My laptop is getting old, yes I know. But Adobe, your updater application slows my computer down more than Photoshop and Illustrator do! Now, I am kind of used to slow these days, so I normally wouldn’t complain too much if it weren’t for the craziness I witnessed this afternoon after rebooting from the latest system updates from Apple.

I was never happy with Adobe Updater, so I normally tell it to go away when it does come up. Given that, I had an update to install — Acrobat 8.1 Update. Fine, I just restarted, so I’ll let it go through before I start back on my work.

Maybe not a good idea.

Steps to update Acrobat 8 Professional

Hit update on the Adobe Updater. (My CPU and HD will now be pegged for the install, Okay I am used to that.)
Waiting about 10-15 minutes…
The install is seemingly 90% completed or so. Now a dialog comes up that says some items need “repaired”. Items like the Safari PDF Plugin, eww, no thanks — too slow. So I uncheck that and let it go to town “repairing the PDF Printer”.
Woops, I see a dialog that says “Wait For App Shutdown Title” — “Please click OK when other apps have stopped” with both Cancel and OK buttons. What? Wait a moment, wait for what app to stop? The updater? Because that’s the only app really running in the Dock. Confused, I click OK.

It returns. I click OK, again… I see a pattern emerging here.

After a few bouts of click madness just for fun, I click Cancel. I have no idea what that means. The dialog doesn’t read well obviously. Cancel could mean destroy the computer immediately for all I know.

But then it works. Five minutes later, I am greeted with this screen:
Looking at Acrobat’s information in Finder it is indeed updated to 8.1.0.