If you’ve been following along, you know that I recently had to reload my PC. Which of course turned into reloading all four of the PCs in the house and setting up a server complete with Windows domain and centralized antimalware protection. You know, for fun.

Part of reloading PCs is reinstalling all of the old software. So I got to the point where I wanted to load Adobe Acrobat Reader so I could read PDFs.

I went to the Adobe website to download the latest version, and I paused… Uhh… 41 MB? Can that be right? For the Portable Document Format reader? So I started crawling the world wide web of information for some more, you know, information.

Not only is Acrobat Reader 9 a 41 MB download, but it balloons up to over 200 MB once you install it.

Now I may be old fashioned, but there’s nothing portable about a 200 MB application. Plus for all that bloat, it still takes 30 seconds to launch, and is annoying for a variety of reasons I don’t feel like listing. If you’ve got Acrobat Reader you know what I’m talking about.

So, the search for alternatives was on. I tried a variety of free Acrobat Reader alternatives, but I settled on Foxit Reader 3.0.

It’s a 3.5 MB download, 7 MB installed. And it loads FAST. I mean, lickety split fast. In a blink of an eye fast. And there’s no splash screen, no “speedloader” that loads itself on startup, and no secret memory hogging service running in the backgound.

There were other alternatives that were even smaller and even faster, but the Foxit product keeps most, if not all, of the functionality that I ever needed from Acrobat Reader but without the bloat and extra crap.

My only complaint is that they (in a disappointing and very Adobe-like fashion) try to sneak the Foxit Toolbar and (for some reason) a link to eBay on your desktop as part of the install. But you can opt out of both.

I’ve been using it for a few days now with no other complaints. There’s still a chance that it could turn out to suck, but if you want to significantly speed up your PC, try it out.