Good things in life do not have to cost a bomb. Below I have compiled a best list of the top around 80 free software, you can make use.
Office Suite
OpenOffice.org - OpenOffice.org is a viable alternative to Microsoft Office - even for professional use. He can do anything desk can.
AbiWord - A light version of Microsoft Office. Simple and straightforward interface; easy to use.
Jarte - A word processor based on Microsoft WordPad. It can be run directly from a USB flash drive.
Notepad ++ - free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.
EditPad Lite - A general purpose text editor, designed to be small and compact, while providing all the features you expect from a basic text editor.
Security
avast! 4 Home Edition - a complete antivirus solution that is able to detect computer viruses, to create and check the integrity of installed programs, the test performed open programs and documents, to test and check email and other functions.
AVG Anti-Virus - free security solution that is easy to use, has little system resources, automatic update functionality and ability to protect the files are opened and programs are run.
Comodo Firewall - A free firewall constantly monitors and defends your PC against Internet attacks. It is a fully functional product that comes with continuous updates that are free forever!
McAfee SiteAdvisor - A plugin for Firefox and IE browser shows security clearance when browsing the web.
SpyCatcher Express - A free anti-spyware program that enables novice PC users to remove spyware aggressive stops next generation, spyware mutation blocks reinstallation of aggressive spyware and removes spyware safely and automatically.
Startup Monitor - A small monitoring program that constantly keeps an eye on the startup entries in your system. Whenever a change is made, you will be notified and a choice of either allowing the change or not to change.
SuperStorm Freeware - This software allows you to hide your confidential files and folders in a wide variety of media files such as images, audio, video, executable programs among many other file types.
Windows Defender - a free program that helps protect your computer against pop-ups, slow performance and security threats caused by spyware and other unwanted software.
HijackThis - A tool for removing malicious software that made a detailed log of what happens in your registry and gives you the ability to remove things that could be suspect.
Zone Alarm - This software allows you to block uninitiated and unwanted traffic, even when your PC is unattended or while you are not using your connection.
Desktop management
Pretty term - a small program that can search your start menu, desktop or any other folder for shortcuts.
RoboForm - RoboForm memorizes and securely stores each user name and password the first time you log into a site and automatically supplies them when you return.
AutoHotkey - This open-source utility can automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write macros by hand or use the macro recorder. You can also create hotkeys for keyboard, mouse, joystick, and handheld remote controls.
Safe KeePass - A password manager that helps you manage your passwords securely. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or disk drive.
Clipomatic - A clipboard cache program that remembers what was copied to the clipboard and allows you to recover, even after you've copied to the clipboard something else.
Browser
Firefox - Firefox includes tons of useful features such as tabbed browsing, integrated and customizable search bars, a feed-in player and a huge library of extensions developed by thousands of developers.
Opera - Opera introduced Speed Dial which greatly improved the navigation on your favourite sites. In addition, there is protection against fraud, anti-phishing detection keeps browsing safe and secure.
Crazy Browser - A browser that lets users collect tabs into groups, and then load an entire group at once. This feature is very useful for research as you can assign a set of related sites, if necessary, without having to manually open each one.
Fun and Games
Banshee Screamer Alarm - An alarm clock snoozebox designed to wake you up. Play MP3, run programs, or shut down your computer at the time you set.
BZFlag - An open cross-platform multiplayer online source 3D tank battle game. It runs on Irix, Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac OS X, and other platforms. This is one of the most popular games ever on Silicon Graphics machines.
ConWare IconArt - A single icon and cursor editor of use that allows your to design your own, edit previous icons, create cursors, programs capture icons and DLL files or import an image for your icon.
Google Earth - Google Earth combines the power of Google Search with satellite imagery, maps, terrain and 3D buildings provides geographical information in the world at your fingertips.
Tux Racer - bored and sick of the Windows game? Tux Racer lets you take on the role of Tux the Linux Penguin as he runs down steep mountains covered with snow. Enter cups and compete to win the title!
ZSNES - A Nintendo emulator on your desktop. ZSNES is built to run on Windows, DOS, Linux and FreeBSD Unix and it is by far the best SNES emulator available.
Sky Charts - A chart that lets you find out what constellations and planets are visible tonight.
Graphics Editing
GIMP - A complete image editing software with capabilities not found in any other product of free software. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an image for mass production, or an image format converter.
Paint.net - A free image editing software and photo that features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.
Google SketchUp - a powerful and easy to learn 3D software tool that combines a set of tools with an intelligent drawing system that streamlines and simplifies 3D design simple but robust.
IrfanView - A fast and compact picture viewer / converter that is simple for beginners and powerful for professionals.
Video and Audio
Audacity - A complete recording and audio editing software that is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU / Linux and other operating systems.
Media Monkey - a music manager and jukebox for serious music collectors and iPod users. It offers an intelligent tag editor which looks missing Album Art and track information via Freedb and the web.
CDex - An application that records audio tracks from CDs and save them on a regular disk file as WAV or encoded sound files.
iTunes - A digital-jukebox software most downloaded. Comes with the iTunes Music Store, which offers music at 99 cents per song.
Winamp - A media player that supports many audio and video formats. It also plays streamed video and audio content, both live and recorded, authored worldwide.
VLC - a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
QuickTime Alternative - This application allows you to play QuickTime or Real videos without Apple or bloated, in-your-face proprietary players from Real.
PDF creator
PrimoPDF - A free tool to create high quality PDF, including a user-friendly interface that enables printing to PDF from virtually any Windows application.
PDF Creator - A simple PDF creation tool for those who just want to skip the technical steps and produce a PDF file. If you know how to print, then you know how to use this software.
doPDF - Using doPDF you can create PDF files from virtually any application. You can search for text within the created PDF file, and search engines will also index the text in the PDF.
Virtual Server
VMware Server - VMware Server installs on any existing server hardware and partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines by processor abstraction, memory, storage and network resources, giving you greater hardware utilization and flexibility.
LogMeIn Hamachi - VPN that allows you to access your home PC from work (or vice versa) as if you were sitting right in front of her.
OpenVPN - OpenVPN is a proven solution. It is completely secure and infinitely configurable. You can install and run this software without relying on a third party.
Instant Messaging
Windows Live Messenger - The next generation of MSN Messenger. It comes with everything that was already available in Messenger, and a new initiative that makes JE helping your favorite charity as easy as sending an instant message.
Pidgin - An instant messaging client multi-protocol that allows you to use all your IM accounts at once. Pidgin can work with AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo, MySpaceIM and much more!
Trillian - a fully featured, stand-alone, skinnable chat client that supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC.
Skype - a software that allows you to make free calls anywhere in the world.
Download Manager
Download Accelerator Plus - A download manager that can improve your download experience. Features include a search box, safety audit for each site and applications you download, more speed per connection and resume the download file preview broken when you download.
Internet Download Manager - a tool to increase download speeds by up to 5 times, and for resuming, scheduling, and organizing downloads. The program will resume unfinished downloads due to network problems, or unexpected power outages.
Getright - As a download manager GetRight supports BitTorrent downloads too. In addition, you can use GetRight to schedule your downloads for later; it can dial your modem (if necessary), download the files you want, then hang up or even shut down your computer when it's done.
DownThemAll - A Mozilla Firefox extension powerful and easy to use application that adds new advanced download capabilities to your browser.
Flashgot - A Firefox extension that allows you to manage single and massive downloads using external download managers of your choice.
File Management
Eraser - A security tool for Windows that allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns.
Restoration - An easy to use and simple tool before you restore files that have been deleted from the recycle bin or directly deleted from Windows (we could recover photos from flash card that had been formatted).
Torrent Manager
Azureus - A popular torrent manager that allows you to install the plug-in and refine your own settings.
uTorrent - A BitTorrent client very, very small that packs enough features in this small package to compete with beefier applications like Azureus.
BitComet - A bit torrent manager that allows video files to be played while they are still being downloaded, and there is a built-in chat tool that allows users to chat with other peers in the swarm.
Backup Program
Cobian Backup - A multi-threaded program that can be used to schedule and backup your files and directories from their original location to other directories / drives in the same computer or other computer in your network.
Back4Win - A backup program that uses industry standard ZIP compression ensures that your data will be accessible regardless of the PC operating system. Not 4Gb and 65535 file limit of other ZIP backup programs.
DriveImage XML - This software allows you to backup logical drives and partitions to image files, browse these images, view and extract files, restore these images to the same or a different drive and copy directly from the Reader's license.
JaBackup - Backup enables advanced automation features. You can schedule backup tasks by the second or minute, or on a hourly, daily, weekly or monthly.
Xdrive Desktop - Xdrive gives you 5 GB of online storage space to store and backup your files. The Xdrive Desktop Software allows you to backup and synchronize your data with the web server with a few mouse clicks.
Gmail Space - Use your Gmail account as storage by uploading and downloading files via a browser-based interface.
File Compression
7-zip - This software compress files in the new 7z format with LZMA compression. It supports multiple formats including 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS.
Winzip - Using WinZip you can quickly and easily compress and decompress files, folders, and entire folder trees to save storage space and reduce the time e-mail transmission, and encrypt and decrypt documents sensitive.
AutoUnpack - This is designed to unpack your compressed file in a single quick step. You simply point a folder containing your ZIP or RAR file and choose an output directory. Press a button to start a process that ends with the archive decompressed perfectly, or let the program automatically uncompress this directory every minute of the serial number.
ExtractNow - A simple program allows you to extract more than one archived file at a time, with one click of a button, making the extraction of the fastest and easiest files.
System Optimization and Diagnostic Tool
CCleaner - A system optimization and privacy tool that removes unused files from your system and allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space.
Security Process Explorer - A manager of improved tasks that provides advanced information about programs and processes running on the computer. It displays all the standard information, including file name, directory path, description, CPU usage, etc., and an evaluation of the unique security risks.
CPU-Z - This mini software lets you know everything about your computer. You can find information such as processor name and vendor, core and not process step, processor package, internal and external clocks, clock multiplier, partial overclock detection, and the characteristics of the processor including supported instructions sets.
EULAlyzer - It takes your EULA agreement and analyze in seconds, and provide a detailed listing of potentially interesting words and phrases. Find out if the software you are about to install displays pop-up ads, transmits personally identifiable information, uses unique identifiers for you, or keep up. It is ideal for picking privacy issues.
Process Explorer - An advanced process management utility that picks up where Task Manager stops. It will show you detailed information about a process including its icon, command line, path of the complete image, memory statistics, user account, security attributes, and more.
Auslogics Disk Defrag - This software is designed to address the slow and accidents caused by the fragmentation of the system disk. It is fast, simple easy and what is more, it is efficient.
SmartDefrag - SmartDefrag boasts an auditor system that constantly defragments files you use the most, and it does it without becoming a persistent drag on your system resources. The "Set It and Forget It" feature works automatically and quietly in the background on your computer and it eats 14MB of RAM, so it is possible to use it smoothly on older machines.
Local cooling - fighting global warming from your desktop! Local Cooling automatically optimizes the energy consumption of your PC using a more effective power save mode.
Belarc Advisor - Belarc Advisor builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, and analysis of factors such as whether antivirus software is current, or if all the security flaws in Windows have been patched.
Email Client
Thunderbird - Thunderbird makes mailing safer, faster and easier than ever with the best implementations of features industry, such as Intelligent spam filters, a built-mark RSS feed reader, and quick.
Eudora - A robust email client whose features include multiple address book formatting options and the ability to filter, redirect and forward mail. It supports rich HTML QuickTime- and email, allowing you to include stylized, formatted text and graphics online in your messages.
Opera Mail - Opera Mail is integrated with the Opera browser and allows you to send, receive, sort and search for faster and easier e-mails with conventional e-mail programs.
Sylpheed - a surprisingly versatile email client. "Surprisingly," because it has a friendly, easy to use interface to its many useful features.
PopTray - Premier pop-up Mail Checker for standard POP3 and IMAP accounts, including Gmail, and may be required to work with the mail like Hotmail HTML only by following the instructions on the site PopTray.
Photo Organizer
Google Picasa - A free software that helps you locate and organize all the photos on your computer, edit and add effects to your photos in a few simple clicks and share your photos with others through email, prints and on the web.
XnView - A fast multi-format graphics browser, viewer, and converter. It features an Explorer-like browser that allows quick and easy navigation directory contents.
FxFoto - This software provides a single tool to organize automatically, improvement, annotate, e-mailing, printing, downloading and archiving your digital photos.
Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition 3.0 - This software makes it easy to find, fix, and share your digital photos. Instantly fix flaws photos in just a click or two.
Jalbum - a gallery software which makes web albums from your digital images.
Video Converter
Free FLV Converter - This free software allows you to search YouTube and Dailymotion videos without opening your browser and you can even watch the videos using the built-in video player.
Free Video to iPhone Converter - Convert video files to Apple iPhone MP4 video format. Convert the whole movie or select a partition from the movie to convert (trim video).
Any Video Converter - all-in-one video converting freeware with an easy to use graphical, fast converting speed and excellent video quality.
iPod Video Converter - Free iPod Video Converter provides an easy and completed way to convert all popular video formats to iPod video.
FTP client
Filezilla - a complete FTP client that supports Secure FTP, SSL, and other protocols in a slick interface, with a tree-site manager that lets you store settings for multiple sites.
SmartFTP - An FTP client that allows you to transfer files between your local computer and a server on the Internet. SmartFTP offers secure, reliable and efficient transfers that make it a powerful tool.
FireFTP - FireFTP turns your browser into an FTP client, a file manager twofold for downloading and uploading.