Firefox provides a safer, more customizable, convenient browsing experience for netizens. I refuse to use Internet explorer for several reasons; exploit vulnerability, lack of standards compliance, poor configuration interface, and lack of options. I've used Firefox (and Firefox precursors Mozilla, Firebird, etc) for the majority of the last decade. The only Windows browser I feel is an acceptable alternative is Chrome. But I still prefer Firefox for the greater customization options, including a vast array of useful add-ons.

Chrome is a fast, solid browser which is, in my opinion, on par with Firefox. I prefer Chrome's speed, but in regard to customizing and add-on/extension functions, it's not quite as powerful as Firefox, so to speak. It is definitely a better option than Internet Explorer.

Thunderbird is the email client from Mozilla, the organization that develops Firefox. Thunderbird is an excellent alternative to Microsoft's Outlook. There are plugins available, but I don't have any experience with that feature. Thunderbird does everything I need from an email client without any add-ons.

Irfanview is an image viewer and much more. If you're used to using the default image viewer included with Windows, I recommend Irfanview as an upgrade. Users have a multitude of configuration options, but the default configuration should be satisfactory for most. My personal favorite feature is the ability to scroll the mouse wheel to go to the next picture in a file folder. This is a feature anyone who does digital photography should be able to appreciate. Irfanview also offers some simple editing functions, including easy cropping, resizing, and format conversion. Batch renaming and format conversion are also available, and relatively easy to figure out. Irfanview is one of the first programs I install every time I install Windows.

Whether you're burning an audio CD, MP3 CD, ISO image, or DVD, DeepBurner gets the job done. It's not as robust as Nero, but it's free, simple, and effective. There is one problem worth noting. If you select your ISO file and are ready to burn the disc, you may have to resize the window to see the ‘Burn ISO’ button in the lower right corner of the window.

7zip is a powerful archiving/compression tool. It supports many formats, including: zip, 7z, rar, tar, gzip, bzip2, cab, jar, iso, rpm, deb, and quite a few more. Built-in support for zip files in Windows is pretty weak. 7zip is an excellent remedy which adds lots of functionality. If you're using 64-bit Windows and/or a multi-threaded CPU, you can also benefit from support for those features, for faster compression and decompression.

LibreOffice is an excellent alternative to Microsoft Office. MS Office generally costs upwards of $200. LibreOffice provides essentially the same functionality, compatability with MS Office files, and is free. Kind of a no-brainer for home use, unless you absolutely need to be guaranteed 100% glitch-free compatability with MS Office for work-related purposes. Even then, it's generally a safe bet. I used its predecessor in college, and my professors never mentioned errors when they opened my documents in Word or Excel. But users need to keep in mind that if they want their documents to be read in MS Office, they should be saved in the appropriate format. LibreOffice uses its own file formats by default. Note: LibreOffice is my recommended successor to OpenOffice. The OpenOffice project was forked when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems and control of OpenOffice with it. LibreOffice is the new project.

VLC is a media player with built-in support for many audio and video formats. VLC has robust configuration options, support for subtitles, automatic or manually specified aspect ratios, playlists, and more. I use VLC as my default video player instead of Windows Media Player. The interface is much more intuitive than WMP.

Media Player Classic has the interface of the old Media Player from earlier versions of Windows. MPC is preferred by many people who like the simple, effective interface which was abandoned in favor of something "more flashy" but less intuitive. I prefer VLC, but MPC would be my next choice.

Winamp is a very popular media player, primarily for playing audio files. This has been my primary choice for playing MP3 files for several years. There are loads of configuration options, support for playlists, skins, album art, lots of awesome visualizations, and much more.

Filezilla is a great FTP client, and has been my personal choice for several years now. It has support for transfer resumes, transfer queuing, drag and drop, SFTP, FTPS, and much more. If you need to access an FTP server for downloading, uploading backup data, site administration, or anything else, Filezilla is a solid choice. Note that there is also a Filezilla server available.

For some reason, Microsoft has neglected to fix a nasty problem with recent versions of the Notepad program that has been included with Windows since Windows 1.0 in 1985. When viewing or editing a large file, spacing of the text may become distorted. Notepad2 solves that problem, and introduces helpful features such as line numbering and syntax highlighting, while maintaining the speed of Notepad; something Wordpad has not retained, at least in not in Windows 7.