DancingSword's Journal: Free Personal-Software for Hardware, Linux, and Windows...

Please remember this -- you probably use a wordprocessor more than anything, but your system's software reliability/availability-to-you is dependent on 3 things:
Immune-system ( Anti-Virus software )
Blocking Trojans + undermining + attack ( Firewall software )
Preventing spyware/stealware from undermining your system ( spyware-detecting software )
Without these basics, you don't have any right to rely-on your system, because it isn't born with built-in self-protection ( unlike organisms ).
Try Shields-Up to discover how open your system probably is ( mine's Linux/IPTables firewalled, so it's locked-down rather well, according to this -- stealthed everything. ). Backups are necessary too, to protect against loss, however induced ( virus, worm, trojan, screwup, flaky-hardware, brownout/blackout/spike/glitch... ), as is a good surge-suppressor or UPS
( UPS-sizing hint: if your machine eats 350w, and your monitor eats 130w, then sum those values, 480w in this case, and double that number to get the VA rating of the UPS you need for your machine, 960VA-rating needed in this case. Why double it? Because the power-supply in your machine is .7 efficiency, and converting from watts to volt-amps is .7-factor, and .7*.7 == .49, so 960VA*.49 == about 480w, see... ).

Hardware RAM-testing: this doesn't need an operating-system at all, because it is the 'OS' ( for the tests it is made-of ).
MemTest86 for testing the trustworthyness of one's system RAM ( I had to reseat the DIMMs in my A7V motherboard 3 times to get 'em to connect cleanly, and pass that test -- please don't assume all flakyness is due to failed components when the connection-between 'em is very oft the problem ).
AND .. I just discovered this cpu-testing regime for Linuxers ( windows tends to hide problems, so I don't know how one'd discover if one's machine didn't work right in it, sorry ).

Organizer of Information -- Linux: TuxCards ( it's supposed to be an equiv to CueCards for Windows, but CueCards is German-only so I can't know if it truly is, or not )
Dug around, and discovered NoteKeeper, which seems to be the free equiv to TuxCards, and it may well be superior in development right now...

Text Editor -- Windows:
Edit Pad Lite. Linux's crawling with Text Editors, from Kate to Emacs, e3 ( fave of mine ) to vi ( shudder ), but Edit Pad Lite is the best free text-editor for Windows I know of. One of the first things I do on a Windows-system I'm working on is replace Notepad with Edit Pad Lite, then I'm not obstructed with Notepad's braindeadness anymore : )

Wordprocessor -- Linux and MS-Windows:
AbiWord Light + Quick Wordprocessor -- you wouldn't believe how quick this is compared with normal wordprocessors, and it's totally free.

Anti-Virus -- Windows:
Grisoft's Anti-Virus - AVG is free-for-personal-use, and you need an immune-system for yourself, and your system ( immune-deficiency is bad: infections are frequent and more-fatal without an immune-system ).
Anti-Virus -- Linux: F-Prot.

Anti-Spyware -- Windows:
Lavasoft's Ad-aware Anti-Spyware program is crucial a component of privacy-protecting ( what privacy's permitted by the Microsoft EULAs, anyways ).
Right, hit that link, and get a message about some spam-sleazeball pretending to be Lavasoft.de, and referring to 'em.
-sigh-
So. The New Link to 'em, and the link from there you want is the Download Our Software link ( which I'm not linking directly to, because I want you to see what it is you're considering/installing ).

Firewalls:
In Windows, use ZoneAlarm ( rather than the for-money ZoneAlarm Pro ), to firewall your system from the 'net.
In Linux, use GuardDog or, for an extremely basic setup of the Linux kernel's IPTables, try Levy.

Safe and Friendly Web-Browser -- both Linux and Windows:
replace brain-damaged browsers that seem nice but aggressively undo the privacy and security of your system, both, with Mozilla ( this is a great concern with Windows, not Linux, really ).

Compression-utility -- Windows:
The 7-Zip program integrates with Windows Explorer so when you click/open an archive a new Explorer-window opens, with the contents of the archive in it. This is FREE, no spy-ware, no steal-ware, no ad-ware, no pay, no hassles. It works.

Sound-Editing -- Windows:
Audacity .. 'is a free audio editor. You can record sounds, play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, and MP3 files, and more. Use it to edit your sounds using Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo), mix tracks together, or apply effects to your recordings.' ( they said it better than I coulda, see ). I believe it requires wxWindows library ( I don't live in Windows, so I don't worry about these things, sorry... )

FTP client program -- Windows:
FileZilla is a totally free replacement for WS-FTP, so if you want to be uploading web-pages and understanding what's going on, or downloading mega-stuff from some ftp-server, in Windows, this is the one you want/need.

Computer Aided Design ( drafting ) program -- Linux and Windows:
'Welcome to the official QCad homepage. QCad is a free open-source 2D CAD system for Linux, various Unices and Windows. The developers main goals are to build a stable, fast and easy to use CAD for everyone. One doesn't need any knowledge of a CAD program to start working with QCad.'

Gnu Win II :
where I discovered many of the Windows-programs listed here... ( they've many more... ), and Windows SW recommendations that are sharp...

Two office-suites ( one Windows-only ), Software602 PC Suite, and the current version ( as of this writing ) of OpenOffice.org v1.0.1 ( which is slow on my system: hence the recommendation of Software602's suite ).
Living in Linux, I've also got Gnumeric spreadsheet, KOffice, the rest of the apps in GNOME's suite, and one hell of a lot of other stuff, too. Try GnuCash sometime, to see what Microsoft Money should have been...

Disk ARchive -- Linux:
.. is the best linux-backup program I currently know of...
Why? Because it backs up significant amounts of stuff to 'slices', which in my system's case are 700MB CD-Rs, and because it can do differential backups, and
because it can verify backups, and
because it can not-compress files of one's choosing ( like rpm's, zip's, tgz's, wav's, etc. ).
It is GPL.

The GIMP, or Gnu Image Manipulation Program MS Windows edition here is a FREE replacement for Photoshop. It works.