Essential Freeware

Can you imagine your desktop or notebook without Microsoft Office, Norton Antivirus, Nero and etc? Why paying extra cash to purchase expensive software whereby you can use freeware with almost similar features. In this article I handpicked several essential freeware that can help you in major computing needs and some positive side of using it compared to the others.

Antivirus
If it’s comes to antivirus software the first thing I will stress is say no to AVG antivirus software. Please don’t ask me why instead I will suggest other anti-virus software which are way better: Those software are quite new among users but its gain popularity for its effectiveness in detecting and protecting system from various threats.

AntiVir Personal
Avast! Home Edition
AVG Free Edition

Firewall
In case you prefer better protection apart from default Windows Firewall, my first choice would be ZoneAlarm. I used ZoneAlarm Firewall before without installed any antivirus software and I never had virus attack (for casual Internet surfing).

ZoneAlarm Free
Comodo Firewall (PC Magazine Online's Editor's Choice)

Browser
Even though Internet Explorer is default browser for Windows, its known for giving problems to the user varies from security problem, lags the system and less user friendly compared to other browsers.

Mozilla Firefox 2
Nothing much to say about this browser, well known enough for its add-on features and security even though having issues for its high RAM usage and freezes apart from that it working like gem. Besides that, you can give a try for Mozilla Firefox 3 – currently in beta stage claimed use less RAM usage compared to Firefox 2.
Opera

Viewing and Word Processing

OpenOffice
An alternative for Microsoft Office with the user interface and functionalities are almost similar
Foxit Reader
Even though Adobe Reader is famous for using to view PDF format, I prefer using Foxit Reader is far way lighter and small installation file size compared to Adobe Reader. Besides that, Foxit Reader have quite number of interesting features which are not available in Adobe Reader.

Compression
7-Zip
Open source file archiver and support formats: 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB

Image and Photo Manipulation
Adobe Photoshop is famous for this purpose however; its way too expensive that one can afford it.

Paint.NET
Provide powerful features that expensive commercial applications have. Paint.NET requires the .NET Framework 2 in order to run.
Inkscape
Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
The Gimp

CD/DVD Tools

CDBurnerXP
A popular freeware able to writes all standard formats up to Video DVD pr Blu-ray even as multisession or boot medium. Besides that, CDBurnerXP able to create and burn ISO files and create bootable discs as well.

Media Players

VLC Player
Supports wide variety of popular multimedia format such as MP3,OGG, 3gp, QuickTime, MPEG, DivX, Real Media and more.
jetAudio
Compared to Winamp and Windows Media Player 11 I found out jetAudio is the best audio player for Windows users by providing wide variety of audio enhancements tuning, good in ripping and burning audio CDs.

p/s: Those are freeware of my choice, so they might be differs with you guys. So, if you wish to add or critic just drop it at the comment section so we all can share it as well..