Speeding Up Acrobat Reader 6, Firefox and ...

[Num3]

Now, every one should know Acrobat Reader 6 loads all it's plugins at startup, and that makes it too slow...

The solution is to copy the plugins into the Optional directory, to make the loading faster, but...

Get yourself a nice copy of UPX, and compress all DLL's and Executables, you'll gain about 10mb of free space and it loads much faster (same speed has acrobat 5!!!), even with all the plugins loading at startup!

(don't forget to use the don't compress icons option!)

So, i've done some tests on software installed on my HD, and here's a list of software (exe and DLL) you can compress without problems:

- Acrobat Reader
- Firefox 1.0
- Nero (don't forget all directories)
- ABC (Yet Another Bittorrent Client)
- Messanger
- Movie Maker
- Winamp (don't forget the plugins)
- Warez P2P
- PureBasic
- Ad-Aware
- Trillian

On these few programs i managed to restore 50mb of disk space, and program executation is *faster* than ever

System32 DLL's (390mb) are also compressable, but, you must do it in DOS, i managed to pack most of them, but it's a risky thing and i will not reveale the list.

These bastards are compressable, but windows insists in restoring the original files...

Media Player
MSN Gaming Zone
NetMeeting
System32 (some DLL's)

Hope you enjoy this tip

[Kale]

You Compression Nutter!

I wonder why its faster? because surely they all have to decompress before being used?

[thefool]

uhm if its big files. When a big exe, say 5 mb is started, its all copied to memory at first and then executed. If you have compressed it to 1.5 mb or so, it only needs to copy that and then decompress directly in memory and then execute. [i dunno if this is faster, but its just a theory]

[Num3]

It's faster... It's faster... It's faster...

Try it out

[Max.²]

These bastards are compressable, but windows insists in restoring the original files...

Media Player
MSN Gaming Zone
NetMeeting
System32 (some DLL's)

Hope you enjoy this tip

In case you are using Win XP, you might need to copy them _also_ to the WINDOWS\System32\DLLcache directory. On your own risk, of course.

[Num3]

In case you are using Win XP, you might need to copy them _also_ to the WINDOWS\System32\DLLcache directory. On your own risk, of course.

Ah! Ah!, so that's the trick...

Num3 aim's UPX at the System32\DLLcache directory

[Taunt]Shrink you bastard's.... [\Taunt]

[GedB]

I wonder why its faster? because surely they all have to decompress before being used?

Because disk reads are slower than decompression.

[thefool]

as i wrote

but i wonder why it is _that_ much faster

[Num3]

Acrobat exe + DLLs = 16Mb uncompressed

Acrobat exe + DLLs = 6Mb compressed

Now i bet it's much faster to load 6 mb of data into memory, than 16mb

Here's what i'm talking about, a sneak preview of MaxSpace

[Karbon]

Very interesting stuff Num3! There *has* to be a tradeoff somewhere though. Reading the executable or DLL into memory is only part of the equation. The UPX docs say that there is no *memory* overhead but there has to be processor overhead for the decompression. Processors being much faster than disk buses most of the time I guess that is where you see the speed increase. I wonder if there is a point at which the read time equals the decompression time and UPX compression yields no benefit.

Still... Interesting project!

[PB]

Firefox always starts slow on my PC, and this UPX trick didn't speed it up.
I guess my PC is just too old for these whiz-bang tricks. Question for any
hardware techies here: if I replace my motherboard with a P4 processor,
can I just plug in all my old stuff, like RAM, hard drive, etc? Will that give
me the speed boost I need? Or does the new motherboard need its own
RAM and so on? I don't have much money to spare... definitely not to buy
a new PC, but a new motherboard alone would be a cheaper solution?

[PB]

> disk reads are slower than decompression

Depends on the file size. Firefox uncompressed = 6.31 MB, but compressed
with UPX it's 2.67 MB. This is such a small difference to a hard drive's read
times. I think Firefox is loading almost instantly on my PC (both compressed
and uncompressed) but it's the initialization of it that's causing the slowness
of "starting up".

[Beach]

Most PIII mainboards used PC100 or PC133 RAM so you will at least need different RAM. The new mainboards require DDR2100 to DDR2700, now there is DDR2 which I have not read that much about.

Also, you might need a different power supply if the one you have does not have enough juice for the new P4.

[Num3]

All in all, a P4 system will be more expensive than an AMD system.

You'll need this:

- ASUS P4 P 800 Intel 865 FSB 800 109.00 €
- INTEL P-4 3,0 E / PRESCOT 1 MB 189.00 €
- 512 MB DDR 400 79.00 €
- 400 Watts ATX P-4PSU 25.00 €

New motherboards come with the following:

- integrated audio
- integrated Lan
- AGP 4x / 8x
- ATA connector / S-ATA (take care with serial ATA, cause you'll need a new Harddisk)

You can buy a AMD system for a better the price the P4 (this is an equivalent system)...

- AMD 2600 XP SEMPRON 95.00 € (2.2Ghz)
- ASUS A7N 8x–DDR 400/DELUXE 109.00 €
- 512 MB DDR 400 79.00 €
- 400 Watts ATX P-4PSU 25.00 €

A new graphics board !?
- NVIDIA FX 5200 AGP 8x- 128 MB 59.00 €

I used ASUS has a reference, but i also like Gigabyte motherboards

Also, get your self a nice 7500 rpm harddisk, that will make a diference