I discovered another alternative by accident today which is called Adobe Reader Lite. You might already know similar products, such as Quicktime Lite or Real Player lite, that strip advertisement and unnecessary plugins and features from those applications to make them more responsive, faster loading and lower their memory usage.

Adobe Reader Lite can only be installed on the system if prior versions of Adobe Reader have been removed. I did remove the 175 Megabyte Adobe Reader 8 installation from my system and began the installation of Adobe Reader Lite. After the installation finished – with no option to choose a directory to install to – it occupied 45 Megabytes of space on my hard drive. That’ 130 Megabytes less, a good start.

The Adobe Reader Lite interface opens almost instantly just as I was used to after using Adobe Reader Speedup. The main advantage in my opinion is that you save disk space and that advertisement was removed from the product as well. Here is a list of what the author did remove:

• I removed autorun and desktop shortcuts.
• I converted the startmenu shortcut to non-advertised.
• I removed several features and plugins that the average user has no need for. (Lite version)
• I removed Beyond Adobe and Lic. Agreement popups.

The lack of information is something that I do not like that much. He is not telling us which plugins were removed and the above solution with Adobe Reader Speedup gives the user more flexibility but disables the plugins only while Adobe Reader Lite does not even install them.

Several freeware alternatives – like the Foxit Reader – are able to display pdf files as well and do that a lot faster than the Adobe Reader. I would like to introduce another possibility and that is to use the software Adobe Reader SpeedUp which speeds up loading time of the Adobe Reader tremendously.

It scans your system automatically for Adobe Reader versions and has the option to speed up the pdf viewer by removing some of the plugins that are loaded during startup. It is possible to either uncheck plugins manually or select one out of four different templates.

I decided to try the Turbo template which loads only a handful of plugins. This had the effect that the Adobe Reader was starting instantly, almost as fast as if you would be starting Notepad. This is a huge difference to the time it took to start before.

You might want to make sure that you do not need the plugins that are deactivated in this process. The Plugin Help button explains what each plugin does which means that you can now make a decision based on those information.

I’m using the Adobe Reader to view pdf documents which works well with the Turbo setting. If you use it for instance to view ebooks protected with DRM you would need the eBook Adobe DRM plugin.

Update: Adobe Reader Speedup has been discontinued A working alternative for Windows is PDF Speedup which offers a similar feature set. The program is compatible with older and the latest Adobe Reader.