Must have programs

[MasterV]

In addition to many of the above, Spybot Search & Destroy for those pesky malware, and Alcohol 52% so that I don't have to take my old discs out of the case and create chaos in my mountain of cases when I want to play one of my old PC games

 

[hyperhammy]

Steam
iTunes
VLC Player
Firefox
Antivir Personal
Open Source

 

[Eduku]

This is a list in a txt file I always keep on my hard drive in case I get new hardware/reformat

7-zip
CCleaner
Classic Shell - Brings back some features from XP you may have missed
Evernote - take notes
Feed Demon - RSS tracker
Glary Utilities
Divx
IMGburn
iTunes
Malwarebytes
Media Player Classic
Microsoft Silverlight
Miro - Video player/converter
Picasa
QTLite
Sopcast (uh, maybe not necessary - I use it for streaming football matches)
Steam
Windirstat - Maps hard drive
Sync Toy - Backup folders
Zune
Lockhunter - Delete files being used
XBMC - Media Centre
Chrome
Oprah
Firefox

 

[Shycte]

If you haven't looked at lifehacker.com before, they have some pretty good suggestions, top 10s, and the like for windows, osx and linux.

And everything there is safe? No viruses or shit? Because they seem to have alot of good stuff there.

 

[freedomweasel]

If you haven't looked at lifehacker.com before, they have some pretty good suggestions, top 10s, and the like for windows, osx and linux.

And everything there is safe? No viruses or shit? Because they seem to have alot of good stuff there.

Most everything there is fairly popular. Generally the lists consist of programs that have already been mentioned in this thread. What I mostly look for on the site is the "hivefive" features they have. They put out the question "What is the best program for task x", and the readers all post their answer, then there is a 5 way poll between the most popular ones. So if you're looking for a DVD ripper, you check out the hivefive for DVD rippers, and you have the 5 most popular ones based on the readers. I'd feel no risk downloading any of those 5 applications.

For the linux programs they post, they're almost all in the distro's repos so there not much threat there.

 

[1relief1]

Winrar, CCleaner, Diskeeper 2010, VLC player [http://www.downloadvlcplayer.net], Bitcomet and Avast.