Well…disaster struck my own personal laptop and killed my hard drive. Fortunately I had backed up everything important. After replacing the hard drive I have to rebuild my pc from scratch.
With the exception of the operating system (windows xp pro with SP3) everything on the laptop is a free app that you can download. Using all of the free apps I can do almost everything I need to do on a day to day basis.

Here is a list of the free apps I installed ( in no particular order) and a brief description of each.
Many of these program are on my Top 10 Most useful free progams list as well.

Free Security Software

  1. AVG Antivirus – Free Antivirus Software
  2. Zone Alarm – Firewall software
  3. AdAware – Very Good Free Spam and Spyware removal software
  4. Spybot Search and Destroy – Very Good Free Spam and Spyware removal software
  5. Windows Defender – Windows Spam and Spyware removal software
  6. Malewarebytes – Very Good Free Spam and Spyware removal software

Free File Transfer Software

  1. WinSCP – Secure file transfer
  2. Filezilla – free FTP client

Free Remote PC Connection Software

  1. VNC – Control Remote PCs
  2. UltraVNC – Control Remote PCs

Free Virutal Computing Software

  1. Microsoft Virtual PC – Allows me to create and run virtual machine. Good for testing OSes
  2. VMWare Player – Allows me to run VMware Appliances
  3. Virtual Box – Allows me to create and run virtual machine. Good for testing OSes

Free WebBrowsers

  1. Firefox – Very good Web Browser
  2. Google Chrome – Very good web browser

Free Office Productivity Software

  1. Notepad ++ – very good notepad replacement with many more features
  2. Infra Recorder – free CD/DVD burning software
  3. Klok – Best personal time tracking software available
  4. Open Office 3 – MS Office replacement.

Free Image Tools/Software

  1. Picasa 3 – Photo editing and organization
  2. Gimp – free Photo Editing software
  3. Paint.Net – free photo editing software

Misc Software

  1. Adobe Acrobat Reader – need to open PDF files
  2. Adobe Flash Player – plugin for browsers to allow flash content
  3. Putty – free SSH client
  4. Izarc – free file compression software
  5. CCleaner – disk cleanup software

Please post a comment if you have other good ones not listed.