A PDF Reader That's Portable And 20 Times Smaller Than Adobe's [1]

If you use a PC you almost certainly need to be able to read PDF files sometimes. Maybe you download a book or a technical manual. Or perhaps you received an electronic statement, receipt or invoice from your bank or another company.

Although Adobe's reader is the official way of reading PDF files, it's also a huge application that takes a while to load and uses up large amounts of system resources. It's also a huge 78 MB download, which is a lot of software to install and keep up to date in order to fulfill what is really a relatively simple function.

A couple of years ago I brought you news of an alternative PDF reader for Windows called Sumatra. Since then, the program has undergone a series of updates but is still just a 3 MB download. And if you choose the portable version, it all unzips to a single 6 MB file which is all you need. There's nothing to install, and it makes no changes to your system registry. So if you don't like Sumatra, removing it completely from your PC involves nothing more than deleting a single file from your desktop.

You'll find the download of Sumatra at http://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/download-free-pdf-viewer.html [3] and it supports all recent versions of Windows (including 10, though the web site doesn't yet say so). The program is malware-free according to VirusTotal and Web of Trust. And while it may not have the glamour of the Adobe version, its tiny size and fast speed may more than make up for its other shortcomings. Especially as it'll happily run from a USB pen drive if you're working on someone else's PC.