Free Lite Programs

Here are some free less resource-hungry programs that I've found useful whcih perform the same tasks or at least the most commonly used tasks:

• Foxit Software's Foxit Reader 2.0 (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/): This PDF reader is 1.67MB, needs about 5MB of RAM, and starts up almost instantly. An .msi file is available for download, so you can deploy this program through Group Policy.

• PDFCreator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator): PDFCreator provides an easy way to create PDF files from any application. It creates a virtual printer named PDF creator. Whenever you want to create a PDF file from a document, you just send the document to this virtual printer. You can deploy this program through Group Policy.

• 7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org/): This program opens all popular compressed files (e.g., .zip, .iso, .rar, .arj). Plus, it provides a new compression format (7z) that, according to the Web site, provides a compression ratio that's up to 10 percent better than the ratio provided by PKWARE's PKZip and WinZip Computing's WinZip. One of my favorite features is that you can compress and decompress files in the background. You can deploy this multilingual program through Group Policy.

• Media Player Classic (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82303&package_id=84358): Although Media Player Classic looks like Microsoft's Windows Media Player (WMP), Media Play Classic is faster and requires less memory than WMP. Media Player Classic is highly extensible.