Software, like many other things, is better when it’s free. I highly recommend the following free software products:
- AVG Anti-Virus, which is a free replacement for Norton. You can always pay a small amount to get their more full-featured product, but the free one does just fine for me. It’s faster and smaller than Norton too.
- If I hadn’t already mentioned it enough, Firefox is a must-have from the free software category.
- Thunderbird is also quite decent, especially if you use IMAP for your email (which you should!).
- Foobar 2000 is quite possibly the best audio player ever. It’s infinitely more customizable than Winamp, has more features, and hasn’t stopped development as Winamp recently has.
There are many more useful free programs, but those are the ones that come to mind right now.