For years, most of us have used Adobe's free Acrobat Reader, later named Adobe Reader, to view PDF files. PDF stands for Portable Document Format and is the easiest way to distribute files and forms to many people without worry about compatibility. Like most commercial software, Adobe's product used to be small, fast and work well. Since version 5 (now they are on 8), the product has become as bloated as many other big name software packages today. It remains free, but will plague your system with slow performance and lots of many irritating automatic updates.
Today, a Windows 98 customer of mine was having trouble with his Adobe Reader versions 5 and 6. After doing some research, I remembered a small, free program called Foxit PDF Reader [1] that does exactly what Adobe Reader does but in an extremely small package. The Foxit download is barely over 2 megabytes which is just 1/10th that of Adobe's 22.3 megabyte behemoth.
If you are looking to get better performance from your PDF reader software, give Foxit a try. It works for all Windows versions from 95 through Vista.
Links:
[1] http://www.download.com/Foxit-PDF-Reader/3000-2079_4-10750536.html?tag=lst-1
[2] https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=rick@yourpcpartner.com&item_name=Buy
[3] http://www.helpmerick.com/picasa_vs_elements_i_challenge_you_dual.htm
[4] http://www.helpmerick.com/5_web_2_0_sites_watch.htm