Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle

"I don't want to use the Adobe PDF Reader anymore. It takes forever to load and the updates always try to get me to install other software. Is there a free alternative solution for reading PDF files?"

There are dozens of free alternatives to Adobe Reader. You will likely still need Adobe Reader if you have any DRM-protected PDFs, but many of the PDF reading alternatives will work. I happen to really like one reader in particular.

My top choice for reading PDFs is Foxit PDF Reader. The application is fairly small in size. Foxit PDF Reader loads quickly. And generally speaking it opens far faster when all you want to do is read a PDF. Foxit is compatible with all PDFs, even the ones optimized only for newer version of Adobe Reader, so you won't run into problems opening PDFs. As I said previously, the one catch is you may have problems opening DRM-protected PDFs. The one other catch is you might run into some issues if you get a PDF with embedded video, but so far I haven't seen too many of those. Download Foxit, set it as the default application for reading PDF files, and forget you ever troubled with Adobe Reader.