Favourite Software

WordWeb : a superb little dictionary program from Antony Lewis & Princeton University

Control Screen Saver: just like it says, from Gianpaolo Bottin for pre-Windows XP, or Screen Druid for XP.

MusicMatch Jukebox: I've yet to find a nicer music handler out there, though WinAmp 5+ is definitely getting close and Media Jukebox is rather nice, too, but dbPowerAmp is one of the fullest packages with the advantage of not loading all modules in memory at once.

Mozilla Firefox : a must have Internet browser, far better than IE, especially as it includes so much that has to be added on to IE as afterthoughts! I've been using Opera for over a year, however, and this is has major advantages, though it is less compatible than Firefox.

Budgie or Open Officeare both excellent office suites, with the latter currently ahead in terms of power, and certainly a true competitor for Microsoft Office - especially as it's FREE and can produce HTML pages or even PDFs! (LATEST: Open Office is now offering a database facility but I haven't checked it out yet!). If all you really want is a very good word processor, then AbiWord is about as good as they come!

For "power users", RegSeeker is excellent and offers many useful tools, especially if you know what you're doing, as does RegCleaner .

Ad-Awareand SpyBot Search & Destroy are pretty much a must have for just about everybody. SpywareGuard and SpywareBlaster also help protect against hijacking and spy/adware, with the former actually operating in real-time. An essentialis a good firewall, such as Sygate Personal Firewall. As added protection, I strongly recommend HijackThis and WinPatrol.

Hook99 is a nice little utility to modify the icon on the Start Menu button (works on pre-Windows XP, that I know of).

For power graphics you're unlikely to beat The GIMP. A perfect complement to The GIMP is IrfanView, which offers a host of easy to use functions, quickly!

For WYSIWYG web page/HTML design, I strongly recommend NVu, a freeware package that offers excellent features and is very easy to use! As an ongoing development project, there are bugs, of course, but these generally are nothing to worry too much about, and some will not trouble the majority of people anyway. This is a very substantial package with superb support via the NVu forum.

Navigation

For anybody wanting to learn to produce Web pages, or to check their page against the latest standards, try

NVu is available from:

Open Office can be obtained FREE from: