Your Recommended Freeware

[ER1]

AVG - never had any problems with it, keeps my computer free of viruses.
Google Docs - Excellent for sharing documents over the internet, can import most microsoft formats and have collaborative editing online.
Google Reader - great RSS feed amalgamator. I am an avid News reader, and this pulls in all of my favourite topics. Only problem is that I read the general news sites far less and so can get a bit narrow in what I read!

[Brad]

Wizmouse.

Makes your Windows mouse work like a Mac mouse and scrolls the window under the pointer, rather than the active window:

http://antibody-software.com/web/software/software/wizmouse-makes-your-mouse-wheel-work-on-the-window-under-the-mouse/

[abigsmurf]

alltoavi - Easy, quick video converter, will take pretty much any video file and convert to avi. Also re-indexes partial or incomplete video downloads which is a godsend.

Only annoyance is it doesn't have multi-core support which makes it slow for HD vids

[smouty]

Not an app as such but http://ninite.com/ helps you install all the most commenly needed apps from a single location.

[charlesr]

alltoavi - Easy, quick video converter, will take pretty much any video file and convert to avi. Also re-indexes partial or incomplete video downloads which is a godsend.

Only annoyance is it doesn't have multi-core support which makes it slow for HD vids

Does it do anything that handbrake doesn't? (perhaps that reindexing?)

[beecee]

Super (c) by eRightsoft converts pretty much EVERYTHING to ANYTHING!

handles formats that Handbrake dosent, its a pig to get downloaded but its worth it, and its much faster than handbrake.

[charlesr]

How come I haven't heard about it before?
And how come it's faster than handbrake? Aren't they both just GUIs to the same thing when it comes to encoding?

I'll give it a go. No malware yeah?

[sj33]

Super is quite well known tbh, though I've never tried it personally. It's perfectly legit.

[charlesr]

Bloody hell. Finding the download link..... nightmare.

http://www.erightsoft.org/GetFile.php?SUPERsetup.exe

[charlesr]

Disappointing result with super c. It spent hours doing something and then spat out a 1k empty file at the end and couldn't tell me why it had failed. Back to handbrake.

[charlesr]

Mentioned before, but big up MS Synctoy2.

My HDD started clicking "OMG impending doom!!!222!!!!"

I immediately closed everything and run synctoy (which I regularly run to my backup drive so it didn't have much to copy). Grabed my desktop too in case there was anything important there.

Drive failed during subsequent surface scan. Everything safe though.

Notes:
A long time ago, I moved my outlook .pst files into My Documents so they are included in the sync (which is my documents)
Xmarks in Firefox saves all my bookmarks remotely.

[k0pp0]

http://www.dropbox.com/

Free storage/sync. Fast and has clients for most OS's (including iphone/ipad)

[EvilBoris]

http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/content/duplicate-cleaner/

Scans your HDD for duplicate files and gives you smart option to delete them, useful if you have 1000s of photos or music files scattered across your HDD and you are running low on space.

[Coheed]

Firefox
CCleaner
Utorrent
Steam

The first four things I install on any new computer.

[briareos_kerensky]

http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/cont...icate-cleaner/

I should pay more attention to this thread, this piece of software is incredibly useful.