Free (as in speech) software recommended by RDeWald

I use Debian. It is a distribution of Linux favored by academic institutions, webhosts, and many Internet entities who require that a computer be operational as much, as long and as fast as the hardware will support.

PuTTY, a Secure Shell terminal emulator for the Windows environment. This is a windows-enabled installer, so all you need do is run this and it will install PuTTY on your system. One would need PuTTY for connecting to remote consoles on non-windows computers. The home page for PuTTY development is here.

NMap Windows Installer. NMap is a port sniffer. Point it at a computer and it will tell you as much as can be known about that computer from a network connection. It is a great tool for security auditing.

HTML-Kit, HTML editor. If you hate WYSIWYG HTML mark-up, if you want to write clean code that is truly interoperable and complies with W3C standards, this is your editor.

Top-Style, a nifty CSS editor. Good combination with HTML-Kit, you don't need to know the tags, Top-Style will tell you what to do.

PDF-Creator works like a printer on your windows desktop. From any application, choose it as your printer and save a PDF of your printer output. Useful, very useful.

HTTrack will save a complete copy of a website for you on the storage media of your choice.

Firefox is a web browser, that program you're using to view this page. Internet Explorer, which comes out of the box with a Microsft Windows system, is unstable, buggy and unsafe. Don't use it (except to download a copy of FireFox to install). Use Firefox and welcome yourself into the wonderful world of tabbed browsing, along with additional features too numerous to recount here. I'm not kidding. Wealth does not confer wisdom or skill. Ditch Internet Explorer as soon as you can.

Open Office is an office suite (think, but don't buy, Microsoft Office) that will run on all major platforms (as in Windows, Mac, and Linux) and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format. If you can't afford a multi-hundred dollar contribution to Microsoft's monopoly (for a license for Microsoft Office), don't use an unlicensed copy, it's not worth it. Use Open Office instead. You can open from and save your work to Microsoft file formats.

CDBurnerXP Pro is a complete solution for your Windows CD and DVD burning needs. If you have an ISO file you need to burn, this will do it.