Here's my List of programs I find essential AFTER I have installed my windows OS:

Nero 7 (burns everything I have great!)
Photoshop CS (can't afford cs2 and don't think I should really upgrade it)
MS Office 2003/OpenOffice (they both pretty good)
VLC (to watch all my anime downloads, thing plays anything you throw at it)
Daemon Tools (great freeware for virtual drives)
Avast AV (pretty good antivirus proggie)
Zonelabs (nice firewall)
MS Defender (free and good spyware blocker from MS! I know I was surprised myself)
Trillian (gotta keep in contact with people you know!)

That's about it I guess. The basic essentials for me. Of course video codecs to watch the anime which i use cccp for. What do you guys use?

If you can afford them, i recommend:

Registry Mechanic -- to clean up your registry, works neat
O&O Defrag -- incredible defragmentation tool, has 4 different defrag methods for different purposes [server, files/database, system partition]
O&O CleverCache -- overrides Windows RAM managment and makes it more efficient
NOD32 -- almost the best antivirus there is..

MotherboardMonitor 5 or SpeedFan and
Samurize -- so you can print out system info like free hdd space, uptime, temperatures etc. straight on your desktop -- fully customizable, sweet thisng

Hmmm... Drivers, photoshop, dreamweaver, limewire, FTP client, Nero, Firewall (windows firewall isnt good enough), anti-virus. Hmmm... and some games, what is a computer without games! even an office computer has games... XD

The programs I install right after reinstalling Windows are :
- Nero Burning Rom (to burn CD and DVD).
- Alcohol 120% (burning of CD images, and virtual drives).
- OpenOffice 2.0 (as good as Microsoft Office, and free).
- PaintShop Pro 9 (I'm a noob with Photoshop, and I don't have the courage to learn).
- Combined Community Codec Pack (to watch videos with almost every codec, with Media Player Classic included).
- ZoneAlarm Pro (good firewall).
- Kaspersky Anti-Virus (good anti-virus program).
- Firefox (of course).
- Foobar2000 (to play music files).
And a lot of others helpful little programs, for ripping, encoding, programming, etc.

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