That’s fine, because other applications do. This message appears because Windows doesn’t understand Apple’s HFS+ file system. Added final paragraph wondering about the unaccounted for space.When you connect a Mac-formatted drive to Windows, you’ll be informed that “you need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it.” Don’t click the “Format disk” button or Windows will erase the contents of the drive–click “Cancel”! Update: Feb 10, 2014. Revised Windows XP numbers to correctly reflect the deletion of the 48MB installer. A second installation of the Adobe Reader went from an estimated 400MB to an exact 411MB. Windows XP was run in a virtual machine that already had System Restore disabled. On Windows 7 it went down from 519 to 387MB.
Without restore points, the space used on Windows 8 was reduced from an estimated 600MB to 387MB. The space usage numbers have been revised, both to reflect the lack of restore points and to replace estimates with exact numbers.
To account for this, I re-installed the software a second time with System Restore disabled. My first go round failed to take into account the Windows Restore Points that the Adobe Reader creates when it is installed. The big question then is: what about the other 260 some odd megabytes? That's a lot of space unaccounted for. The Programs and Features applet in the Control Panel on both Windows 7 and 8 report that the Adobe Reader occupies 128MB of space. It had grown by exactly 405,479,424 bytes (a.k.a. After the installation, the C disk had increased to 24.2GB.
I installed the software from a copy of the 48MB installer on the D disk.
I tidied up a bit and set out to install the Adobe Reader again with the C disk occupying 23.8GB. The installation problem was nothing that a reboot couldn't fix. Two hundred megabytes for a failed installation.Ī little digging at this point revealed that the C:\ProgramData\Adobe\Setup folder was 144MB. The C disk was now 25.2GB (the Recycle Bin was still empty). The final message (below) says that "Your system has not been modified".īut it had been modified to the tune of 200MB. As on XP, I started from the 48MB installer. After un-installing the Adobe Reader, the C disk shrank to 25GB, a savings of roughly 300MB (the Recycle Bin was completely empty before and after un-installing the software).īut, I needed this copy of the Adobe Reader for an upcoming blog, so I went to re-install it on the same Windows 7 machine. On a Windows 7 machine with the latest Adobe Reader installed the C disk occupied 25.3GB. The main installation folder C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 11.0 was the same size on XP as it was on Windows 8, 116MB. An XP user that remembers to delete the installer, ends up with a bill for only 363MB. Installing the Adobe Reader on XP consumed 411 megabytes. The exact increase in space was 430,731,264 bytes or 410.8 megabytes. Installing the software increased the used space to 4.24GB. After doing so, the used space on the C disk was 3.84GB.
This time, I copied the 48MB installer for version 11.0.06 into the XP VM. Not to rush to judgment, I found a Windows XP virtual machine that also had never had any previous installations of the Adobe Reader. More exactly, the used space increased by 406,261,760 bytes or 387.4MB.
Then, after downloading and installing the Adobe Reader, the C disk had grown to 17.4GB. The pre-installer was deleted, but the fate of the main 48MB download is a mystery.īut I suspected something was up before I started, so, before doing anything, I took note of the fact that the used space in the C disk partition was 17GB.
In contrast, my preferred PDF Reader, Sumatra, is 8MB and the PDF viewer embedded in the Chrome browser is 4MB.
The software was installed to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 11.0 which occupies 116 megabytes of hard drive space (this was a 32 bit copy of Windows 8). Following the prompts however, you download a 1MB pre-installer called "install_reader11_en_mssd_aaa_aih.exe" and you never see or deal with the main 48MB installer. The software was downloaded from the official location, /reader which said that the download was 48MB. On a Windows 8 machine that had no prior versions of the Adobe Reader, I did a fresh install of the latest edition, released last month, version 11.0.06. But, while researching the new issue, I ran across yet another reason not to like the software: it consumes mass quantities of hard drive space, at least on Windows. Yesterday I found a new reason not to like it, which I expect will be the next Defensive Computing blog. I'll come clean right off the bat: I don't like the Adobe PDF Reader.