Getting rid of the Tools pane in Acrobat Reader DC

Acrobat Reader is the best PDF viewer. It has the best performance on documents with huge amounts of stuff on a page, such as maps. It also has the fastest searching on documents with huge amounts of text.

Adobe stuffs it with all sorts of crap I do not want in an attempt to sell their online services, but the program starts up reasonably fast despite being bloated. There's just one important annoyance that the preferences can't fix: the Tools pane. It wastes the right side of the screen for a bunch of functions which I never use. It can be hidden, but there's no option to hide it permanently, so it has to be hidden again every time I open a document.

The Tools pane can be disabled by moving or deleting the Viewer.aapp plugin which creates it. For me, it is located at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat Reader DC\Reader\AcroApp\ENU\Viewer.aapp. In 64-bit windows it would be in C:\Program Files (x86)\, and the ENU part could be different if you have a different language installed. I created a new folder within ENU and put the file there, so I can move it back if I ever actually need it or if updates break because it's not there. It may be necessary to repeat this procedure after every Reader update.

AA cell diameter differs

I got some AA to D adapters so I can use AA rechargeables with the RCA RC3000A digital boombox.



The cell I tried was a new Duracell DX1500 pre-charged rechargeable NiMH, rated 2400 mAh. It was a very tight fit, and hard to remove. These adapters lock in the cell when you push it in all the way. You can start removal by pushing on the positive contact, which is like a button. After that, all you can do is pull on the negative side, which sticks out a bit. It's hard to apply a lot of pulling force by hand to a cell that sticks out very little. When I finally got the cell out, I saw the adapter had damaged it.

My first thought is that the inexpensive no-name adapters sucked. Then I tried three other kinds of cells. They all fit nicely. There was a bit of friction with some, but it wasn't a problem. Also, there was no damage. Even the older 2000 mAh Duracell DX1500 (same model as the problem cells) fit properly. Here are the cells. Only the cell at the right has a problem fitting in the adapters.

Does this PNY CS1111 SSD use a SandForce controller?

I recently finally upgraded to an SSD. I'm not too impressed. Some things are much faster, but those are generally rare operations such as rebooting and installing software or updates. Operating system caching and preloading was taking care of common operations. Practically speaking, going from a 160 GB Seagate 7200.7 to a 1 TB WD Black and later upgrading from 2 GB to 6 GB RAM were both more useful.

I chose a PNY CS1111 series 120 GB drive. It doesn't have the fastest read speeds, but it's faster than 3 Gbit/s SATA or 1x PCI Express 1.x, so the GA-P35-DS3R motherboard is the bottleneck.

According to PNY's 2015 SSD Product Comparison PDF, the CS1111 series uses a Silicon Motion SM2246EN controller. However, the SMART attributes don't make sense as SM2246EN attributes, and make sense as SandForce attributes. For example 241 and 242 are definitely measuring gigabytes. So, is PNY's information wrong? Are there multiple versions of this drive with different controllers? PNY's support didn't answer. I don't feel like opening up the drive to see if there's a SandForce controller inside, because that would void warranty. Here are the SMART attributes, as reported by smartmontools.

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_
FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       82
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       85
171 Unknown_Attribute       0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
172 Unknown_Attribute       0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
174 Unknown_Attribute       0x0000   000   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       2
177 Wear_Leveling_Count     0x0000   000   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
181 Program_Fail_Cnt_Total  0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
182 Erase_Fail_Count_Total  0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0000   033   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       33
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       1262
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0000   098   098   003    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
201 Unknown_SSD_Attribute   0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
204 Soft_ECC_Correction     0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
230 Unknown_SSD_Attribute   0x0000   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       39
231 Temperature_Celsius     0x0000   100   100   010    Old_age   Offline      -
       33
233 Media_Wearout_Indicator 0x0000   000   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       0
234 Unknown_Attribute       0x0000   000   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       1
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   000   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       125
242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   000   000   000    Old_age   Offline      -
       52

If the Malicious Software Removal Tool won't go away, next month's updates might fix it

In May I stopped installation of Windows 7 updates because one simple update seemed to be taking a long time with no activity. After that, the May 2015 Malicious Software Removal Tool would not go away. It would install successfully every time, writing to C:\Windows\debug\mrt.log and setting HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\RemovalTools\MRT\Version to the proper GUID. Nevertheless it would reappear after the next check for updates.

There were various ideas online, and I tried everything except deleting C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution. Nothing helped. Eventually I just created a DWORD at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\MRT\DontOfferThroughWUAU, setting it to 1 to disable offering of the tool via Windows Update. You cannot simply hide the update, because then last month's tool is offered instead, and so on.

I just removed that setting, wondering if the June updates might fix it. They did. I don't know what happened. Maybe the June Malicious Software Removal Tool set something that Windows Update finally recognized. All I know is I spent way too much time on this little problem.

BTW There is some useful information in KB891716.