Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader) is pretty much required software on every PC these days. This tutorial assumes you’ve already read the initial article “A Guide to Installing Windows Applications Silently” and have followed the setup instructions it contains.

Begin by creating a directory called AdobeReader in your %APPS% folder. Next, go to the Adobe Reader download page to download the Adobe Reader software. You have the option of also downloading ‘Adobe Yahoo! Toolbar’ and ‘Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition’. I prefer to just have one install at a time, and don’t have a need for those two packages, so this tutorial will only include the bare Adobe Reader install (uncheck the extra download options). At this writing, the available package is version 7.0.7 for Windows XP, if you’re downloading a different version, some of the file names listed below may need to be adjusted to match what you’re downloading. Save the download to any location you’d like, it doesn’t need to be in your %APPS%\AdobeReader directory (in fact, it’s probably best not to save it there as it won’t actually be needed for the future silent installs).

Once you’ve downloaded the package (mine is called ‘AdbeRdr707_DLM_en_US.exe’), double-click it and it will use the Adobe Download Manager to collect the required pieces from Adobe (you will need an active internet connection). You’ll then see a Fead Optimizer window doing some setup work, and will eventually get a ‘Welcome to Setup for Adobe Reader’ screen. You may be thinking at this point ‘Hey, this isn’t very silent’. You’d be right, because we haven’t gotten that far yet. What we do now is retrieve the files necessary to do the silent install, which weren’t available until this point. You can cancel the installer, we don’t really need to go any further with it, it’s job was simply to get the files for us.

Go to the folder that was just created by the installer (probably C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0) and inside you’ll see a folder called Setup Files, which contains a folder called RdrBig707. Inside that is a folder called ENU which contains the installation files for Adobe Reader. Copy the files Adobe Reader 7.0.7.msi and Data1.cab to your %APPS%\AdobeReader directory. If you like to keep things clean, at this point you can delete the initial installer file you downloaded, as well as the directories the installer just created, all we need is the two files in your %APPS%\AdobeReader directory.

Now that we have the install files ready, we can create the script. Create a text file¹ called Install.bat in your %APPS%\AdobeReader directory. In the text file, place the following:

@ECHO OFF ECHO Installing Acrobat Reader 7 start /wait msiexec /qb- /i "Adobe Reader 7.0.7.msi" copy HKCU.reg %temp%\HKCU.reg /Y start /wait ..\changeHKCU.vbs start /wait ..\ModifyProfile /PROFILE:all /REG:%temp%\HKCU.reg /KEYNAME:TempHive del %temp%\HKCU.reg del "%allusersprofile%\desktop\adobe Reader 7.0.lnk" del "%allusersprofile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\Adobe Reader Speed Launch.lnk" exit

Here’s what the script does, you can remove any lines that are not necessary in your situation:

1. Don’t echo every line to the screen
2. Echo a description of the purpose of the script
3. Run the Adobe Reader msi installer in quiet mode
4. The next four lines enable you to bypass the ‘Please accept this license’ screen that every user would normally get the first time they open the program. To use this you’ll need to create a text file called HKCU.reg in your %APPS%\AdobeReader directory that contains the following code:
   

   REGEDIT4

   [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\7.0\AdobeViewer]
   “EULA”=dword:00000001

5. Delete the Adobe Reader desktop icon
6. Delete the Adobe Reader Speed Launcher icon from the startup folder (so it doesn’t automatically start every time you login)
7. Exit from the script

That’s it. You should now have an applicaton distribution directory that contains the following files:

• Adobe Reader 7.0.7.msi
• Data1.cab
• HKCU.reg
• Install.bat

Now simply launch Install.bat by double-clicking it, or by calling it from another script, and Adobe Reader will silently install on your computer.

1. sojoe.info/2006/03/27/how-to-create-a-text-file.html [back]