As told earlier…

note: right click and open URLs in new window

1) NOD32 2.006 - Not many would have heard of this, but trust me, Norton belongs to the trash-can. One of the best Antiviruses around, NOD32 is pretty lightweight too. And fast. Infact, the fastest. Completes a full system scan in a matter of minutes.

Also rans: Kaspersky Antivirus Pro and F-secure

2) Winamp 5.03a - Needs no introduction, or appreciation. By far the best. And its free!!. Recomended plugins: Evil Lyrics - get lyrics for any song instantly (needs net connection) Powerplayer (www.powerplayer.tk): Watch vids on winamp.

Also rans: Musicmatch Jukebox

3)Opera 7.50 - Greatest browser with in-built ad-blocker, tabbed browser, email client, password vault..almost everything you’d ever want. Once you get used to Opera, you’ll never want to use anything else. IE? Who? What?

Also rans: Firefox, MyIE, Mozilla.

4)Thunderbird - Simple, easy and robust email client. It’s free too.

Also rans: the built in email client in Mozilla and Opera

5)Yahoo Messenger 6 - nothing to say that is not already known. New users probably would like to know that version 6 has new smilies, Launchcast radio built into the messenger, stealth settings that let you choose whom you are invisible to, audibles (something like smilies, but with audio)….and a new look.

Also rans: Hate to admit, but MSN Messenger (ONLY becoz its popular)

6)Flashget 1.6 - Download manager. Did you ask what? Ok, a download manager takes care of your downloads by: (a)Enqueing your downloads (so that you don’t need to save URLs) (b)Resuming broken downloads (great if you have a dial-up) (c) generally making life easy..

Also rans: Getright, Download Accelerator Plus

7)Winrar 3.50b - For those who have heard of only winzip (coz it comes bundled with Windows), welcome to the sweet world of Winrar. With options such as auto-split, creating auto-extracting files, Winrar not just has more options, but also offers the best compression.

Also rans: I guess only Winzip, by default.
FreshUI - Don’t like to display My Computer on your desktop? Need to tweak your windows settings? FreshUI helps you do it all. A great free tweaking too.

Also rans: TweakNow PowerPack 2003

9)ZoneAlarm Pro 5 - If you have cable internet (or an always on connx), you’ll definitely need a firewall…nah..you’ll definitely need ZoneAlarm. Easy to use, ZoneAlarm ensures that you stay hidden on the net, and also protected from hackers and the like.

Also rans: none

10) EAC - A cool CD ripping tool, this freeware uses LAME as its primary decoder. Gives amazingly good quality mp3s. It’s a li’l slow though.

Also rans: Audiograbber - infact, this is very good too.

This list will grow….