This is a fairly comprehensive list of freely available software and open source software that we recommend.

DropBox

Dropbox adds a folder to your computer that synchronizes with the drop box servers. It is a great tool to automatically back up important files.

VLC Media Player

The swiss army knife of video players. Need to play a video file that doesn't play in windows media player? This is a must.

AVG Free - Anti Virus

Free anti-virus software for a non-commercial windows computer. Fast, expansive and better than a lot of paid antivirus scanners.

Songbird - Music Player

Think of this as a lightweight alternative to iTunes. This lean and user friendly application makes light work of organising your music collection.

Mozilla Firefox - Web Browser

This is an open source web browser. It is a fantastic alternative to internet explorer and have a massive wealth of plug ins and themes that greatly extend its feature set.

Google Chrome - Web Browser

This is another great internet explorer replacement. It's plug in repository isn't quite as good as that of firefox but it sure is lightening fast.

Filezilla - FTP client

If you know what FTP is then filezilla is a great free tool for editing files on your web server.

IE Tester - Web Browser

This is a web browser that allows you to test internet explorer 5.5,6,7,8 and 9 in a handy environment.

Notepad ++ - Text Editor

A very powerful text editor. Great for all your text editing needs.

GIMP - Image and Photo Editor

This is the best free photo and image editing tool on the market. It is open source, is regularly updated and has a large array of extensions available. Want to create, edit and retouch images? Give it a try.

Wunderlist

This is a really stylish to do list manager. It syncronises your to do list online so you will never lose it and it even had a convenient iphone application.

Handbrake - Video Conversion

If you are into video editing or ripping DVD movies then this is a great tool for trans coding your videos into mpeg4. It has handy presets for converting for playback on portable devices such as PSP and iPOD.

Apache httpd Web Server

This turns your local machine into a web server. Install alongside php and mysql to create an environment for creating bespoke websites and web applications.

PHP 5

Install along apache to create and test php web applications on your local computer.

MySQL 5

MySQL installs a database onto your computer that can be accessed in conjunction with PHP and the Apache web server

MySQL GUI Tools

This pack contains mysql query browser and mysql administrator. This are great tools that replace the need to use the command prompt to run database queries and set up database users and permissions.

Adobe Reader

A bit bloated, but allows you to open pdf files.

Java Runtime Environment

Java is growing greatly in popularity. Having this installed on any Windows, Mac or Linux computer will allow you to run java applications.

Java Dev Kit

This provides all of the libraries and API's for writing java applications.

Netbeans - Software Development Environment

Netbeans is a very powerful software development environment. It supports a range of development languages including java and c++.

Google Toolbar for Firefox

Extends the functionality of firefox. Particularly useful for its auto complete and page rank indication features.

Skype

We live on skype. It is an excellent method of communication and even allows you to video conference.

7z Unzipper

This is an alternative archive compressor to winzip. It also sports compression into a 7z file which provides vastly greater compression levels for most common file types.