Adobe Reader is a wonderful program. It’s main function seems to be to sense when you are deeply involved in writing something you haven’t yet saved, and interrupting you with a notice that it is time to update Adobe Reader. In the old days, this would mean that you had to stop and either update or ask it to wait until later. Now, combined with Macintosh Lion, it’s gotten even better. The little updating announcement remains hidden, so your whole computer just slows down, but you have no idea why. You can’t input to your file. If you are running Itunes, the music stops and the wheel of death comes on. You start going from program to program, quitting the ones you can, to find the problem. If this takes too long your Mac hangs up, even the Force Quit won’t come up, and all is lost. I am writing this on my backup laptop, as I watch my number one laptop try to reboot, going on twenty minutes.

Adobe Reader has another feature, which is to allow one to read pdf files. This is actually useful.

It seems that in order to have this secondary feature, while bypassing the main function, all one has to do is go to preferences and say you don’t want to hear about new releases, you’ll check for yourself. If and when my main laptop regains consciousness, I’ll try this. What the penalty is for not promptly updating, I’m not sure. How bad can it be?