An interesting article on thespypc.com recently listed the ten worst offenders when it comes to software that slows Microsoft Windows to a crawl.

Among the culprits were Adobe Acrobat Reader, MS Internet Explorer, Norton Antivirus, Microsoft Office 2003, and several other commonly used pieces of so-called bloatware.

Thankfully there are various alternatives to these programs that do a similar if not better job and thanks to the Digg tech forum users ninjasquirrel and zirtbow, we can list a few of them here:

Software: Norton Antivirus – “Junk and a resource hog.”
Alternate: AVG Free – http://free.grisoft.com/

Software: Adobe Acrobat Reader – “Slow again”
Alternate: Foxit Reader (free) – http://www.foxitsoftware.com/

Software: Windows Media Player – “Actually not TOOO bad”
Alternate: VLC (free) – http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Software: Internet Explorer – “Yeah”
Alternate: Firefox (free) – http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ (like I really needed to link this one)

Software: AIM 6.0, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Chat
Alternate: Trillian – http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/

Antispyware:
-Spybot: Search and Destroy: http://www.safer-networking.org/

IM software:
-Gaim: http://gaim.sourceforge.net

Media:
-Media Player Classic: http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/
-Foobar2000: http://www.foobar2000.org
-ffdshow: (Open source video codecs for Windows): http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/codecs_and_filters/ffdshow.cfm

Firewall:
-Sygate Personal Firewall http://www.tucows.com/preview/213160

So get rid of the bloatware and install these much crisper programs instead and just watch Windows fly.