Windows XP - Recommended Software

Put on every system I set up:

Freeware

• Comodo Antivirus & Firewall - absolutely commercial quality for free. Great firewall, great antivirus, great registry change watcher.
  
• Copernic Desktop Search - outstanding system search program. Even if you keep things in really tight order, this will help you track stuff down faster.
  
• Rainlendar - outstanding calendar program -- Pro version plugs into Outlook nicely
  
• Alex Feinman's ISO Recorder - a lot of things are exchanged in ISO format and this program makes it super easy to burn them.
  
• 7-Zip - for opening zip, rar, and 20 other compression formats, as well as creating optimized ZIP files and the increasingly popular 7z format.
  
• Firefox - the only browser for my purposes with the great Smoke theme. Plugins: noscript, Adblock Plus, CustomizeGoogle, and PDF Download.
• Winamp - still my main player after all this time followed by VLC and SMPlayer (all come in my portable software collection).
  
• Notepad++ - my tabbed notepad of choice where I do almost all my work
  

Commercial

• Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 - saves enormous time taking notes, no I haven't upgraded to v.10.
  
• Omnipage Pro - use this with a scanner to get all your documents into pure text -- used in concert with Copernic to keep track of all your papers
  
• MS Office 2003 - far, far better than the latest version, where possible try to substitute with Google Docs for simplicity and collaboration or OpenOffice for interface and compatibility. Be sure to get the "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack" so you can open DOCX files. I can't link to it directly because Microsoft loves moving things around on their website so you have to do a Google search for it.