I'll keep adding to this list as and when I find or hear of a good
program... If you want to suggest one, please leave a comment below and
I'll have a look at it.
Anti-virus Software
Although
a lot of the anti-virus programs today are pretty cheap, I still find
the leading products rather resource extensive! They try to do too much
(Don't get me started on Norton Internet Security!). AVG Free is a great FREE Anti-virus program that's very quick and doesn't eat up your memory...
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/5390/lng/us/tpl/v5#avg-anti-virus-free
Spyware Scanner
There
are a lot of spyware scanners / removal tools out there, but this
program seems to be very good. I have only just downloaded it but have
heard a lot of good things about it.
http://www.download.com/SpywareBlaster/3000-8022_4-10196637.html?tag=img
Software Firewall
I would suspect most people have heard of ZoneAlarm, but thought I'd list it anyway. A great free for use firewall
http://www.download.com/ZoneAlarm/3000-10435_4-10039884.html?tag=img
Microsoft office (Well not quite!)
Office is rather expensive, although personally I think the new 2007 version has some amazing features... But
if you don't want to fork out the money, you can get a free version
called open office. - It comes with the equivalent programs to Word,
Excel, Access, PowerPoint & more...
http://download.openoffice.org/2.1.0/index.html
Web Design / Development Programs
After
the comment above about how expensive Office is, good old Microsoft go
and do the complete opposite by giving away some AMAZINGLY good
development programs for FREE called Microsoft Express. They give you
Visual Web Developer, SQL Server Express & VB Express &
more....
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/
(I actually used Visual Web Developer to code this entire website...)
Web Browser (Get rid of IE6!!)
Although
Internet Explorer 7 has now been released and is definitely 100% better
than IE6 ... I still think FireFox is a better browser, it has some
amazing extensions and I still think it supports more standards than
IE... Best of all its FREE
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Image/Photo Viewer & Manipulation
This
great application supports loads of different formats and lets you do
minor manipulation of Photos/Images (Rotate, Crop, Resize, Red Eye,
Colour Changes).
http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm