St. Michaels Episcopal Church STM-CA.net

St. Michael's Computer Class

Class # 1 April 19, 2009 Training Outline (doc)

• Class PowerPoint Presentation - Online
• Class PowerPoint Presentation - Download
• Class PowerPoint Presentation - PDF (PDF 2-up color)
• PDF Reader (Adode Acrobat Reader - Footnote #1 below)
• FDF Reader (Foxit - Footnote #2 below)
• Foxit (An IE browser alternative - Footnote #3)
• Chrome (Another IE browser alternative)

1. Adobe Reader is one of those applications that you'll find on nearly every PC in the world. In terms of compatibility, it's the last word in displaying the Portable Document Format (PDF), a file format that Adobe itself invented back in the day and continues to extend. Adobe claims to have reduced launch times, and version 9 does seem a lot quicker in this regard. That said, it's no slimmer; the installer is a hefty 35MB download, the program itself takes about 200MB of disk space and 26MB of memory when running. While Adobe Reader has a large feature set, many people steered clear of it since the relatively lightweight Foxit Reader hit version 2.3. If all you are going to do is read and print PDFs, then try Foxit reader. Tip: Adobe wants to install an add-on to your browser when you first try to download the program. It is suggested to avoid this by declining to install it and clicking the if-your-download-doesn't-start link. Note: The above link takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.
2. Foxit Reader is a lightweight alternative to Adobe Reader, which for several major revisions grew increasingly bloated and slow. Foxit fit the bill nicely, though for a few versions I still had to keep the Adobe product on hand for graphics intensive PDF files. Rarely is there a PDF file that Foxit Reader doesn't handle perfectly. It takes up far less disk space than Adobe Reader, and--even with much quicker performance of more recent versions of the latter--it's still faster. The latest version 3.0 is still only a 4MB download and despite new multimedia handling features, thumbnail and layers view panels, and some other enhancements--it's still fast, though perhaps a tad slower loading than previous versions. As with many free programs, there's some advertising to sit through. The install asks to add a Foxit toolbar as well as an eBay shortcut, and it wants to set your homepage to Foxit Software, so don't just blindly click through. Also, though the free version handily lets you alter content, there are watermarks in the finished product that are only removed when you purchase the $40 Pro Pak version. All in all, Foxit Reader is the way to go--unless you simply like wasting time and disk space with Adobe's fatter app. Caveat: The latest version of FoxIt Reader makes avoiding installing the Ask.com toolbar a tad tricky. Deselect the first confusingly-worded option as well as the second option which wants to make Ask.com your home page. If you make a mistake, there's no Control Panel-Add/Remove Programs entry and even uninstalling FoxIt Reader won't remove the toolbar. As of this writing you're forced to navigate to C:\Program Files\AskBarDis and run unins000.exe to expunge it.
3. Firefox: For security Firefox 3 will block sites known to spread malware, based on a Google blacklist, along with phishing sites. It also supports Extended Validation certificates, so if you view a site that uses one to verify the site owner's identity, it will be made clear by a large green button with the company's name on the left side of the location bar. Mozilla says that even with these new features, the new Firefox should use less memory after memory leak clean-ups and other programming improvements.