Adobe Acrobat X Review

Anyone here try or buy Adobe's latest PDF creator yet? I figured that I'd give it a try to see if it was an improvement over Acrobat 9 that I own, so I downloaded a trial copy via Adobe's website. If you've read any reviews, you've probably seen that it really isn't worth upgrading from Acrobat 9 if you have it already and for the most part I agree. For the most part it does everything that version 9 does. However, the part that interested me the most was the new portfolio feature that was introduced in this version, so of course, I gave it a shot. I have a few hundred articles in Word format that I've written for a few websites over the past couple years and decided that they would be a good test. After transferring them into the Acrobat X, I then converted them into PDF format and deleted the Word versions (in the program), and now I have 2 separate portfolios covering both websites that are in total 4MB. There are a few caveats though. For one, it isn't exactly the snappiest process in the world. The PDF conversion is fast, but browsing through the portfolios, adding, and deleting files takes some time. Two, this process is a RAM hog. By the time I was done importing, renaming, and deleting in one portfolio, my RAM usage was at 4.7GB! I have a lot of background programs/gadgets running on the desktop, so my idle usage is around 1.5GB with W7 Pro, but still, that's quite a bit of RAM usage.

Now you're probably thinking that I'm running the program with a sloth PC, but it isn't a slouch: Q9400/8GB of RAM/HD 5830, etc... I ran it on my laptop as well: T6400/4GB of RAM/Intel GMA. Obviously, between the two, there is a huge difference in performance and needless to say, my desktop ran Acrobat X a lot better than the laptop. My advice for those who want to buy Acrobat X and use the portfolio feature is to run it on a decent machine with plenty of RAM. Again, like most of the reviews say, unless you need to the new features, I'd stick with Acrobat 9 if you have it already. However, if you are want/need a new version and don't have 9, you may as well go for it.