I decided to post a list of the software that I use. Most of this software is open source, and basically all of it is free. Enjoy.

  • Internet Browser:
    • Firefox 3
      • Awesome web browser, not much that needs to be said.
  • Email Client:
    • Thunderbird 2
      • Mozilla’s email client, also has an RSS reader. Very easy to use.
  • Instant Messaging:
    • Pidgin
      • Open source, universal instant messaging client. It doesn’t give you as many features as you would get if you used the actual IM client for the different protocols, but it’s much more lightweight and lets you have everything in one client. I use this for MSN, Yahoo, and AIM.
    • Skype 3.8.0.188 
      • Skype is a free to use (although there are premium services you can purchase) VoIP service. It’s awesome and I use it a lot for doing video chat and calls to people outside the United States.
      • Note: The link I provided, is not the latest version of the Skype client. As of version 4.0.0.150, which was released July 10, 2008, the entire Skype user interface was changed. I can’t stand it, so I use the old version with the interface that I am used too. If you really want the latest version you can get it here.
  • Multimedia:
    • VLC Media Player
      • Open source, lightweight, versatile media player. I used this for playing videos.
    • Foobar2000
      • Awesome media player. Does what mainstream media players can’t. Great for people who want to manage all their music without all the clutter of other media players. Actually handles libraries with more than 25,000 songs without trouble.
      • Some people will not use the newer versions of Foobar2000, because it’s fairly more cpu and memory intensive than the older versions. I do have copies of the older versions on my PC, I might post a link to them if someone asks me too.
    • Floola
      • I found this the other day, when I was looking for software to sync my iPod, and upload my tracks to last.fm. It seems to be pretty good and it’s just a single .exe file, no installation required. Oh, did I mention it’s cross platform?
    • Irfanview
      • Normally an image viewer is not something people consider important, but if you have to view files like .psd, .tga, etc. You have to get this, it will view anything (literally anything, even text files and .swf, with plugins). It also has tons of other awesome features. Only thing it’s lacking is image tagging and creating galleries, but then again, it’s a viewer, not an Adobe Bridge clone.
  • Other:
    • 7-Zip
      • Open source file archiver. Very easy to use with Windows shell integration. Won’t let you compress .rar (RAR is proprietary, you’ll have to get WinRar to compress .rar format), and sometimes have problems decompressing multi-part archives. But other than that it’s great.
    • OpenOffice.org
      • Open source office suite. Does everything that Microsoft Office does and more. I swear by this.

I’ll probably post more links as I find other software but right now this is what I consider essential software.