Eleven Light weight counterparts of your must have applications [ We Recommend ]

Light weight applications certainly make your computing simple and fast, there are certain light weight counterparts available for almost each and every application you use for your regular needs, and its slowly becoming an installation free world, we do have online tools and services as well.

Here I have tried to list the light weight as well as online tools, which can be helpful in utilizing your system resources at its fullest and a Table which tells you about the unique features are at the end. Don’t Miss the Table !! and a PDF of this table is also available at the end

approved lieght weight softwares

Audio Players

Audio players are the applications everybody has and all of us love music. So which player do you use? If I am not wrong, majority is with Winamp, no-doubt, Winamp probably has everything you need as a music lover, but as far as light weight application is concerned, try Foobar2000, its extremely light weight with just 2.64Mb of setup file. Player approximately consumes 1.9 Mb of your RAM, this is very less as compared to others. You can read more about Audio Players here ( 5 Popular and Free Audio Players Tested).

Video Players

Video Player doesn’t generally hamper much of your computer performance as when you are using a video player, resources are dedicated to it fully because at that time you cant work on your computer, but you might face some problem while you are running some other application in background, so the preferred light weight video player is VLC, as far as I have seen it can play almost any format you can offer it, can also be used as an audio player.

PDF Readers

PDF readers are another must have, Acrobat Reader is the most well-known PDF reader ever, recommendable counterpart of Acrobat Reader is Foxit and Cool Pdf Reader, and if you don’t want to install anything you can use PDF Hammer or PDFescape. You can read more about PDF Readers here.( 5 Popular PDF readers which are free)

Office Suites

MS-Office is the Office Suite, generally used by almost everyone, Google Docs is a better replacement for your office suits, its an online tool, no installation required, if you have an Internet connection with good speed, it works like a charm. For offline users Open office.org is good substitute, I personally haven’t used it but people who have used it have a good word for it.

Antivirus Software

I have always used free Antivirus Softwares for my system, so, no experience with the paid ones, still NOD32 is preferred by several users, I prefer AVG and Avira Antivir, both are quite light weight, free and efficient antivirus. More about Free Antivirus Softwares can read here.

Messengers

These days several Messengers are available, I have used only Yahoo and MSN Messenger, and I prefer the web messengers for both of them, i.e. Yahoo Webmessenger and MSN Webmessenger. You will find them little less in features, but if you messengers to chat with your online friends, these are pretty cool.

Download Managers

Download Managers are very helpful to achieve fast downloads, Free Download Manager and Download Accelerator Plus are the best full featured download managers, they are light weight and automatically get associated with your web browser. You can check out How to effectively use Free Download Manager in depth

Dictionary and Thesaurus If you need only a Dictionary, Wordweb is the best option, and in case your requirements are that of a Dictionary and Thesaurus both, you can go for TheSage’s English Dictionary and Thesaurus Apart from these, online options are also present i.e. Ninja Words. More can be read here about Ninja Word.

P2P File Sharing Limewire is well-known application of this field, but for me Frostwire worked better, yet as per the system requirements both have same requirements, but Frostwire is pretty lightweight as compared to Limewire. For file sharing Dropbox is also a great way, as of now its in beta, and you can only start using it with an invite only.

Imaging Tool

Generally some of your imaging needs can be fulfilled by MSN Paint, and in case, your requirements are beyond this, Picasa is best in my view, it has several options, even the worst quality picture you clicked due to lack of lighting arrangements, can be made live with it, and even Irfan View ( Check out How to reduce image sizes in batch ) is recommended by many, Picasa and Irfan View both are light weight.

Compiled List of All of the Light Weight Tools with Unique Features

Category	Name of Application/Tool	Uniqueness (Apart from being Light Weight)	Download File Size
Audio Player	Foobar2000	Supports almost all the audio formats.	2.64Mb
Video Player	VLC	Almost every video format can be played without any extra codec downloads.	9.28Mb
PDF Reader	Foxit	Almost everything you would need out of a PDF Reader.	2.14Mb
PDF Reader	PDFescape	Add Text and Shapes to PDF files without form fields Add Links and New Form Fields to PDF files. Etc.	Dependent upon connection speed
Office Suite	Google Docs	Fully online, no installation Required	Dependent upon connection speed
Antivirus	AVG	Offline updates	22.5Mb + Updates
Antivirus	Avira Antivir		6.9 +Updates
Messengers	Web MSN and Web Yahoo	Fully online, so no installations	Dependent upon connection speed
Download Managers	Free Download Manager	Download Modes	5.64Mb
Download Managers	Download Accelerator Plus		7.66Mb
Dictionary and Thesaurus	The Sages English Dictionary and Thesaurus	Structured lookup display Advanced wildcard search Tabbed interface Anagram search	7.21Mb
P2P File Sharing	Dropbox	Very fast Ideal for file sharing within a group Sharing capacity is 5Mb.	Dependent upon connection speed
Imaging Tool	Picasa	Transfer, find, organize, edit, print, and share images,	5.14Mb

Download this table in PDF Format

About The Author of this article:
Manav is one of the co-author of this blog and writes on various interesting softwares, PC tips and more. You can read more of his articles here.

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21 Comments and Link-Backs to “Eleven Light weight counterparts of your must have applications [ We Recommend ]”

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19 Comments from Friends and Readers

Famf, March 19, 2008:

I find Media Player Classic to be more lightweight than VLC, and I think it plays more when you install it with the Combined Community Codec Pack.

Here’s a picture of the memory usage of VLC and Media Player Classic while running a DVD quality MKV file.

http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/8510/21329478bm2.png

Media Player Classic is also running with enhancements to the video while VLC is not.

Here is a picture showing the original video on the left, and the enhanced video on the right.

http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/1728/kinoyv0.jpg

That’s my two cents
Keith Dsouza, March 19, 2008:

Nice list of softwares. I used most of them including Foxit, AVG, FDM, VLC, Google Docs and Picasa.

For messengers I prefer using Trillian since it allows me to login into all the messenger clients at once.
Ashfame, March 19, 2008:

@Manav
Correct the line under Office suites.
It says “Google Docs is an online tool, so installation required.”
You missed “no” over there.
I like the post. Stumbled!
Ashfame, March 19, 2008:

^^Mind correcting my name in the above comment.
Manav, March 19, 2008:

@ Famf, it would be great if can you share with us how you made that difference?
Famf, March 20, 2008:

@Manav
A little tweaking to FFDshow’s video decoder.

Here’s a picture of how mine’s set up:

http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/2158/80405509zc6.png

And I learned how to do it from Jimmyrcom:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZoSqhk0-QA
TechnoLaziness, March 21, 2008:

I couldn’t resist from commenting on this post. It seems ninja words is really fast. I use Visuwords for that purpose. I also use utorrent for P2P file sharing.
But haven’t ever tried Dropbox.
—
Rohit
Elections photos, March 21, 2008:

I prefer DC++, Emule and BitTorrent for file sharing.
Nicholas Francis, March 31, 2008:

hey very good list of light weight softwares. I love the download accelator by speed bit, its really fast. I personally recommend it. And thnx for sharing this wonderful info
Kavitt S, April 1, 2008:

Thats a very informative post…ya must haves
Kavitt S, April 1, 2008:

ya continuation of my last comment…

in download managers, i would like to add that ‘Download Accelerator Plus’ has some sort of spyware(maybe)…the speedbit part is quite annoying…the ads as well and some other browser integration features

MASS DOWNLOADER IS A MUCH BETTER OPTION(my feeling)
Manav, April 2, 2008:

@Kavitt S, I am using DAP, and did not find any issues, will give a try to Mass Downloader, Thanks for sharing.
Ajay Pathak, April 16, 2008:

please check this article before comparing the google docs with microsoft office
http://readerszone.com/office-suite/google-docs-vs-microsoft-office.html
http://readerszone.com/office-suite/google-docs-a-bunch-of-errors.html
Manav, April 16, 2008:

@ Ajay, I went through both the articles, great find indeed, but I didnt compare MS-office and Google Docs on the basis of the features, Google Docs was preferred by me, as a light weight option.
Ajay Pathak, April 16, 2008:

thanks manav for visiting my blog but we have wait some time to replace microsoft office
because most of us are using the Microsoft office original or pirated version. no office suit has the features that microsoft office has one thing is not there collaboration but they are working very hard for this.
lets wait for some time
Ajay Pathak, April 16, 2008:

please add some firewall also u can use blog post for adding some free firewall because they are also very important now a days
~~readerszone.com/tips/free-vista-firewall~~
only limitation is that they only work with vista and xp
Ashish, April 16, 2008:

@Ajay: Firewall is not relevant to this article ( Which talks about Light weight Softwares) and there is no heavy weight firewalls normal users would like to us.. Moreover Using a firewall can be tricky business. Some softwares or even some sites get blocked because of them. From a normal user’s perspective its not easy to configure them as they don’t understand the inside story of Firewalls.

I had used some firewalls before and I was heavily tricked and was not able to access many sites. Its better to use what Vista or XP firewalls.
Ajay Pathak, April 16, 2008:

ya got it actually is miss the theme of the post.
Pallab, June 5, 2008:

An excellent list.
Only one which I dont agree with is DAP. I would rather reccomend something like flashget.
I would also say that Avira Antivir is much much better than AVG.