Five Applications that Don’t Suck to Replace Ones that Do

To be heard, you sometimes need to be blunt, and Download Squad is just that. According to them, the applications you use suck, but it’s alright, because they have five alternatives for the five said applications that reek of garbage.

Of course, moving to a free application doesn’t mean much if the application itself sucks, but their choice of five don’t. Run the ultra-bloated Nero? Ever consider CD Burner XP instead? I admit that Nero is a little bloated, but there are a few features found there not found in CD Burner XP, which is why I continue to use it. I admit though, CD Burner XP is tempting, in all it’s lightweight glory.

Another recommendation is replacing Adobe Reader with Foxit PDF Reader… and this is one I can whole heartily agree with. I don’t mind Adobe Reader for the most part (it’s even more of a pain when you are running the full-blown commercial version), but the incessant update nag screens is what causes me to move my chair back so I don’t throw a monitor. “Do you want to shut down all Adobe applications and continue with the update?” Yeah! In fact I was hoping for that! In all seriousness though, their five recommendations are great, and free, so check them out.

I’d wager that you can open and close Foxit about half a dozen times before Reader finishes launching once. It’s 92% smaller and still manages to render PDFs very accurately. What more can you say? A PDF reader should, well, read PDFs. It doesn’t need to do any other fancy crap.