Google Chrome is one of the fastest, if not THE fastest, web browsers available at the moment. It’s also lightweight meaning that it doesn’t have a bunch of add-ons and plugins to load slowing your browsing speed like IE and, at times, Firefox. The thing that I like most about it is that you can do a Google search right from the address bar instead of using Google’s site or a search bar like other browsers have. It also features a start up page, when enabled, that gives you thumbnails of your six most visited sites. Gmail users-it can also act as an offline e-mail client with the installation of Google Apps (which comes with Docs and Calender as well).

OpenOffice.org is an open source Microsoft Office replacer. On the surface it can do everything MS Office can do. OOo has it’s own version (shown in parenthesis) of Word (Text Document), Power Point (Presentation), Access (Database) and Excel (Spreadsheet) as well as a drawing component (Drawing) and an advance mathematical equation editor (Math). These features should suffice for the average user of MS Office, but of course Microsoft’s version comes with a plethora of other cool programs including my favorite, OneNote.

The one thing I really like about it is that there’s only one icon associated with all the programs so you don’t waste a lot of desktop or quick launch room. On the other hand, the one thing I dislike about it is that it has no e-mail client like MS Office does, but that’s cool, I use Gmail anyways. Oh yeah, die hard MS Office users should know that OOo can also read and create MS Office file formats.

Windows Live Mail-Yes, I put a Microsoft product on the list of essentials; I apologize if you thought I was trying to steer clear from everything MS with this list. If the program works well, regardless of the manufacturer, I’ll use it.

As much as I hate Bill Gates for charging so much for MS products, this e-mail client is free and by far the best I’ve ever used. It’s so easy to set up because it almost always retrieves your email provider’s information foregoing any configuring on your part. It runs faster than Mozilla’s Thunderbird, on my system anyway, and is more user friendly than Mulberry. To me, it’s just a great all-around e-mail client.

CCleaner is a free PC optimization tool that features a Windows registry cleaner, a temporary file cleaner, which cleans the temp files generated by a ton of programs, and startup programs manager which allows you to choose what programs you want to run when your computer boots up. This feature will also let you delete the entries you don’t want.

Another thing this little program does is that it securely empties your recycle bin by overwriting all the files so that file recovery is impossible. I use the registry and the temp file cleaner functions almost daily.

Revo Unistaller Free Version does the one thing I wish CCleaner did: properly and completely uninstall programs. You may be asking your self “Doesn’t Windows, the program and/or CCleaner already do that?”

The short answer is yes, they both do that, but what you probably don’t know is that many programs leave behind “traces” of themselves even after you’ve uninstalled them using the methods aforementioned. These traces are left behind because of, among other things, poor programming of the program’s uninstaller. CCleaner does a great job with the registry, but programs often leave traces of themselves in your App Data folder, Program Files folder and others that CCleaner doesn’t mess with (it uses the program’s uninstaller).

With this program installed, you can be sure you’ve gotten rid of everything the program you want gone has put in your computer. I should mention, however, that the paid version of this program essentially adds the same functionality that CCleaner has, but comes in at a whopping 40 USD.

KeePass-Tired of keeping up with all of your passwords for various sites across the net or losing them when you do a complete browser cleaning? Well look no further, because this nifty program will keep track of all of that for you with a few clicks. When you first install it, you are prompted to specify a database location and name. This will store all of your usernames and passwords securely using one or all of the database protection options this program has to offer. After the database creation you can create new entries that store your user name, password and login page info.

Like me, you probably use the same password for everything. This is not recommended for obvious reasons: if someone has one of your passwords, they have them all and that’s not cool, man. One of the key features of this program is it’s password generator which lets you randomize strings of letters, numbers and symbols many different ways to generate a new password. One thing I really like about this program is that you can virtually browse your passworded sites using just KeePass. It allows you to bring up the page you specified for the password entry and then it can auto type your user name and password for you. Very handy if you have a suspected key logger infection.

WinRAR-Not really much to say about this program. It goes above and beyond the built in Windows unzip program in that it can unpack .zip, .rar, .cab, .arj, .lzh, .tar, .gz (and tar.gz), .bz2 (and tar.bz2), .ace, .uue, .jar, .iso, .7z and .z files. You’ve probably not heard of more than half of those file extensions as the two main file types you’re likely to need unpacking are .zip and .rar files as well as the highly occasional .7z (on Windows anyways). Yes, I know 7-zip does the same thing and it’s open source, but I like WinRAR better simply because it’s what I’ve used for many years.

Flash Renamer-As mentioned in my most recent Review post, Flash Renamer is a godsend when it comes to renaming many different types of files. With FR you can change the casing (upper to lower-case and vise-versa), add strings at specific positions, remove sections of the file name and trim spaces out. If you collect MP3s, File Renamer also has a ton of useful tools for renaming music files such as an MP3 tagger and ID3/lyrics tag editor. If you are a photo collector FR also lets you change dates and file attributes as well as edit Exif tags. You’ll have to visit the official “About” page for all the other uses of this program, because I could literally make a whole post of it.

uTorrent-For those of you who like to download “Content Distribution” torrents, uTorrent should be your number one choice. It’s light-weight, fast and it uses almost no system resources. I’ve heard that you can also download tons of movies, TV shows, music, ebooks and other randomness from torrent sites such as thepiratebay.com as well as search for them with torrentz.com, but I really wouldn’t know anything about that seeing how you have to own the original to download it legally…this is all just stuff I’ve heard… truly.

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 9.0-There’s not really much to say about this program either except that it protects you from most known viruses and spyware and will also scan links on a page to help you determine whether or not the site you are trying to visit is potentially dangerous for your computer’s health. This is really just one of a ton of great anti-virus programs out there. This just happens to be the one that I use. You’ll also note that I said “most know viruses”; that’s because there aren’t any that can completely detect every threat your computer might face.

Well that about sums it up for this post. Let me just say again that these programs are ones that I personally use and in no way am I trying to say that these are the best at what they do. This list is also in no way definitive. There are many other great programs out there that you may find useful and by all means, feel free to point them out to me if you like as I am a collector of programs (sort of). And just to point it out, I’m in no way affiliated with any of the makers f these programs what-so- ever in case you’re wondering.

-That is all…