Printing from Acrobat Pro 8.1

I recently purchased and installed a copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.0 (well, 8.1). I have been mostly pleased with this application, but while using it I have discovered that I have a new pet peeve.

When I go to print a document from Acrobat, a Print window is displayed and there are a number of choices that I can make regarding my print job. The vast majority of the time I am just looking to print one copy of the file, so I click the OK button and my file prints out. Every once in a while I need more than one copy, so when the Print window is displayed, I go to the Page Handling area and enter a larger number in the Copies option and click the OK button to have my job print out.

The problem that I have is that the next time I print, the program does not reset the number of copies back to "one". When I print again, I have to remember to actually stop and look at the Print window to see what the number of copies is set at before I print. I find this to be an annoyance because 95% of the time I use the program, I am just clicking the OK button to move through this screen.

If I last used this program to print 10 copies of something a couple of days ago, the odds are pretty good that when I first use the program to print today, I am going find myself printing 10 copies (instead of 1) and throwing out rest of the copies of today's document. And then to reset this counter, I am going to need to print one more copy of a document to actually get the counter reset to 1 for future print jobs.

I run into this problem in many different programs, but for some reason it really aggravates me in Acrobat. This could be because when I print more than one copy of a PDF file, I tend to be MANY more copies, not just two or three. Or it could be because there are a few hundred choices in the Preferences area, but nothing I see fixes my issue.

Realistically, I would like to see a little checkbox on the Print window that actually asks if you want to save the print count for future jobs. No check in the box and the program defaults back to 1 copy for future print jobs. This would be a resource-saving green option for many programs, not just Acrobat.

Having this option would save me a little of my sanity and many reams of paper.

Final Frontier

At work, I receive the mail from a couple of public email addresses and these addresses have a habit of getting hammered with Spam. As a practical matter, I cannot filter spam on the server level because I need to be able to see what getting flagged as Spam and isolate it into a separate folder in Outlook.

For the past few years I have been using a program called MailFrontier Desktop to divert the spam out of my Inbox. MailFrontier was up to the task for a while, but lately it has started to miss more than it filters out.

Trying to solve the problem, I clicked the "check for updates" button in MailFrontier and found no updates available. I then took a look at their website. I found that MailFrontier.com now re-directs me to SonicWALL. It looks like they got bought out. I have no idea how long ago this happened; it could have been last week or last year.

Google still has a link to a live ordering page on the MailFrontier site so I could renew my annual license when it expires. Mind you this leaves me spending money on what is likely a dead product, while watching my Inbox fill with spam; not a good solution.

I spent a few minutes wandering around the SonicWALL site, but could not find an obvious upgrade/re-naming of the MailFrontier Desktop app. There is a software product there, but it is described as being for "qualified customers who need to protect 25 mailboxes to over 5,000 mailboxes using their own SMTP-based e-mail or for Managed Service Providers to use to protect the SMTP-based e-mail of their customers." This leads me to believe that I am not the target audience. I have to assume that the SonicWALL folks are not interested in my business as an individual.

AntiVirus Software

Over the course of the last week, I found myself removing Norton antivirus software from a couple of machines that belong to friends of mine. Both machines had similar problems with being incredibly slow. By slow I mean that they took far too long to boot up and then ran sluggishly for a while as the various startup scans took place.

When you are waiting to use your computer, this kind of lag is just brutal.

For many years when someone asked me what antivirus software they should get, my answer was also to get Norton or McAfee. This is not the case anymore. I happily used McAfee from the early 90's until about 2002 and then switched to Norton for a couple of years. In fact, the last copy of Norton that I bought for my own machine was Norton AntiVirus 2005 and I uninstalled it long before the subscription ran out.

In my opinion, both McAfee and Norton have gone astray in recent years. They both switched over to an annual subscription model and appear to have become a bit too focused on selling themselves. They crammed our computers full with little billboards advertising their application, trying to make it more important. Does the user really need to know that the antivirus program has downloaded a new update? Probably not, but the little ad pops up after the update finishes and reminds the user that the XYZ antivirus program has done some work.

And what is with the perpetual scanning all of the files? If an antivirus program scans all the files that you add to your machine via email, downloads, CD's, disks, and everything else, then why the hell does the software also need to do full system scans so often?

I get that the virus signatures change perpetually, but does the antivirus program really need to keep scanning the all 200,000+ files on my machine? Shouldn't there be some capacity for an incremental scan of just the changed files? My Maxtor backup drive does an incremental scan and just backs up the changed files. That takes less than minute to run.

Also, antivirus programs now install a toolbar for Internet Explorer. Does anyone really need another toolbar for IE? Is this toolbar something that the user is actually going to interact with? No. It is just another billboard.

These days I just install the free copy of AVG antivirus software, the free copy of ZoneAlarm for a firewall (mostly to see what is trying to go out), and use FireFox for a web browser.

Most of the antivirus and antiphishing really comes down to being careful about what you open and interact with; the software can only do so much. To avoid many problems, simply do not click hyperlinks in emails and do not open emailed files that you were not expecting.