Comodo Firewall will close open ports on your computer, which stops hackers from being able to break in. A firewall stops hackers from being able to access your computer. You need to run some sort of firewall!!! Comodo Firewall has many advanced features, such as pop-ups that give you information on risks, component authentication that tests to see if your programs have been modified, and shutdown protection that prevents spyware from stopping the firewall.

Dropbox is an online backup / syncronization utility that synchronize any files inside the Dropbox folder to Dropbox's servers and any other computer linked to your account. It uses SSL and encryption when it transfers your files to protect against interception. It keeps different revisions of changed files which allows you to easily restore a previous version. You can also access your files from the Dropbox website, allowing you to retrieve files on a computer connected to the Internet without having to install Dropbox on that computer.

IZArc is a compression / archiving program that supports more than 30 formats. Many files on the internet are compressed to make them smaller so you can download them faster. IZArc will allow you to open and edit these files. This program will open .zip, .rar, .ace, .cab, .tar, .tgz, and many other files. It will also open CD image files. I think this is a quality program that is every bit as good as WinZip. Not to mention free.

CDBurnerXP is a freeware CD/DVD burning program that supports CDs, DVDs, HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray. It can create boot CDs, erase discs, and convert .nrg and .bin CD images to a .iso CD image. It can also create audio CDs from mp3, flac, ogg, wav, and wma files.

Google Earth takes satellite imagery and combines it with the ability to tilt, zoom, search, create driving directions, measure distances, and show some buildings in 3D with textures to create a realistic 3D model of the earth. They also allow you to load in sophisticated overlays like terrain, roads, borders, airports, etc.

OpenOffice is a direct competitor of Microsoft Office. It is even mostly compatible with Microsoft Office. It has a word processor, a spreadsheet, a drawing program, a database program, and a presentation program. It has many advanced features, like wizards to guide you, spellchecker, autocorrect, and it can save documents as PDF files. And it's free.

Media Player Classic is much better than the Windows Media Player. It looks like the old Windows Media Player and can play many different formats. I think it even has some support for QuickTime and Real Media formats. Say goodbye to other ultra-annoying media players and hello to the last one you will ever need. I also recommend getting a Codec pack that will allow you to play most video files from the internet.

PhotoFiltre is a graphics editing program is by far the best and easiest to use out of all of the freeware editors that I have tried. It has a good selection of filters and many nice additions like 'autocrop' that make image creation and editing easy. You won't have to spend much time trying to figure out how to do something because the interface is well designed and clean.

XnView is a picture viewer and converter. It supports over 400 image formats, so it is very unlikely that you will come across a picture that you cannot open. It also has some basic editing options, such as rotate, crop, brightness, contrast, filters, effects, and more. It can also rename and convert images in batch. I personally think this program is better than IrfanView, which is another freeware picture viewer.

Mozilla Thunderbird is a mail client that allows you to check your email (pop and imap). It has built-in encryption, junkmail filters, anti-phishing protection, a spell checker, and supports extensions and themes. Thunderbird only replaces the email functionality of Microsoft Outlook, if you need a calendar, I suggest Mozilla Sunbird.

Restoration will restore files that have been deleted from your computer, even if you have emptied your Recycle Bin. It has the best success rate of any file recovery program I have used. It can run from a floppy disk or USB key, which is probably a good idea so you don't accidentally overwrite the files you are trying to restore.

CDex is a program that allows you to rip (encode) a CD as MP3 files using the Lame encoder, or to another format like Ogg Vorbis, Ape lossless format, etc. It can also convert a wave to a compressed format or vice versa. CDex will also automatically insert ID3 tags from the CDDB. It is one of the most downloaded programs on SourceForge for a reason.

AceMoney Lite is a personal finance manager that can track your investments, bills, credit and checking accounts, and provides charts for where your money is going. It can import and export files into multiple formats which is useful for online banking. It also has some support for importing transactions from online e-businesses such as eBay. AceMoney Lite only supports one account.