Big PDF Handling: Acrobat vs. Preview

I had the occasion to help out at the polls today. A coworker had a G4 iBook and a data CD with all the registered voters in our county on it, including name, address, precinct numbers, voting location, and birthdate. There were about 400,000 voters on the PDF file contained on this CD. We used it to determine if voters were on the master registration list and also to find out a voter's precinct number and voting place if he came in with just an ID and no voter registration card.
Anyway, my coworker only had Preview on his iBook, no Acrobat. Preview handled the big PDF but scrolling sometimes got brutally slow with lots of beachballing. We tried using the search feature in Preview and also Spotlight but had little success with that.
My question, would Acrobat have been as good, a little better, or way better to use if he had had it on his iBook? What else could we have done to improve our handling of the PDF?
P.S. We did drag the PDF off of the CD to the Desktop so that we were working from the HD and not the optical drive.
Thanks,
Steve M.

HI Steve,
"Preview handled the big PDF but scrolling sometimes got brutally slow with lots of beachballing. We tried using the search feature in Preview and also Spotlight but had little success with that."
Much of this depends on the size of the CD file, if there was sufficient hard disk space on the iBook, RAM, and if the owner of the iBook has performed any maintenance. If you saw the beach ball just viewing text in a PDF file, I'm more inclined to think that it was the iBook causing the slow down, rather then whether or not it was viewed with Adobe Acrobat or the Mac's Preview.
I use both Preview and Acrobat on my 60GB iBookG4, but I keep a lean machine plus I do maintenance weekly. Both Preview and Acrobat function as they should without the beachball syndrome..
Carolyn
Message was edited by: Carolyn Samit

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Big PDF Handling: Acrobat vs. Preview

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