Executive Summary: To make your computers less resource-hungry, you can install "lite" programs. If you have Windows Vista and work with PDF files, you might want to check out these two free lite programs: CutePDF and PDFTools.

In his Reader to Reader article “Lighten Your Computer’s Load” (September, InstantDoc ID 96615), Apostolos Fotakelis talks about some free programs that he uses to make his computers less resource-hungry. I used to use all of those programs. However, when I upgraded to Windows Vista recently, I discovered that I could no longer use PDFCreator. Fortunately, I found an alternative: CutePDF (www.cutepdf.com). CutePDF is free, does everything that PDFCreator can do, and is Vista friendly.

Another PDF utility that I like using is PDFTools 1.3 (www.sheelapps.com). This free program lets you:

• encrypt a PDF file by assigning it a password
• create a protection-free version of encrypted PDF file
• create a PDF file by joining multiple PDF files
• split a PDF file in multiple ways, such as splitting each page to new PDF file and splitting a file after a given page number
• arrange pages in a PDF file
• overlay text or an image over a PDF file
• convert an XML file into a PDF file

Note that you need Java Runtime Environment/Java Development Kit (JRE/JDK) 1.4 or later to use PDFTools. This program works great with either Vista or Windows XP.

-Jeff Owens,
System Administrator,
Key Fasteners Corp.