A new PC - your essential apps, please

[cdd]

I find winrar a much better product than Winzip, mainly because it's faster and has really nice shell integrations. Plus it can compress to more than winzip can. Finally my unofficial tests show that it produces smaller file sizes (on max compression) than winzip, and does it faster too. Unlike winzip it's really fast and compact, plus you can skin it Plus don't forget Winzip encryption is easily crackable.

Yes it's biased, but -- http://www.rarsoft.com/compare.htm

[Charlie Wells]

A few handy free bits of software
- Firefox
- Thunderbird
- Avast
- 7Zip
- FileZilla
- OpenOfiice (has option to save as PDF)
- Trillian

[cdd]

I've never tried Filezilla, does it have any significant advantages over the FireFTP extension for Firefox (which is also free?)