So many documents an academic comes into contact with are published in PDF and require Adobe Acrobat Reader to open them. But the Acrobat Reader is incredibly slow to load. Version 8 improved things a bit on fast computers but it is still annoying. Enter the free, agile FoxIt reader which just came out with version 2.3 that introduced tabbed browsing (among other innovations). It's far superior to Acrobat Reader in every way. And you can even put it on a memory stick if you download this version - simply unzip the file on your memory stick and you can have fast comfortable PDF reading on any Windows machine. If you spend any time at all with PDFs, you must take the time to set up FoxIt, it will save you many headaches. (NOTE: Acrobat Reader 9 is supposed to come out in July with promises of improved speed but my money is on FoxIt.)

Foxit Software Foxit Reader is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 2.55 M download size), breezing-fast launch speed and rich feature set. Foxit Reader supports Windows Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.7.