My download finger is sprained at the moment. There are some really cool apps listed. I know some of them. I highly recommend Audacity. Had it before on my HP. VLC media player is also a good one. I wanted to check out DualbootPro but there is no price listed that I could find.

Might throw some free "Must Have" suggestions up as well.

7-Zip

FastStone Image Viewer

Revo Uninstaller

TrueCrypt

Winpatrol

Add CCleaner too...

All suggestions welcome!

LastPass is a must have.

Also...

DropBox and/or Sugarsync

I have to say...I LOVE FAststone. I have tried Picassa and several others, including Adobe's stuff and always come back to Faststone.  It's amazing to me that they don't charge for it.

I also recommend Glarys Utility.

Indeed. Glory Utilities is a fave of mine as well.

Picasa 3.8 is a wonderful entrance level photo processor with batch abilities since Picknic was purchased by Google.

Revo and Faststone get's my vote. 

Bookmarking this as a 'must have' thread..... 

thanks doc..

Syd... always a pleasure.

For Faststone 4.3  download site: http://www.faststone.org/

This isn't so much a utility as it is a script based on Stylish's themes. You can enter this into Firefox and turn ANY webpage into a dark, glassy vista style page. Truly amazing and hurts nothing.

Vista Dark Glass Script

Revo uninstaller - Ccleaner - Paragon Backup and drive manager - Smart Defrag - Advanced System Care - IOBit 360 (good AV app) - EASEUS Partition Master 6.5.1 - IZark (which handles 7zip and a hoost of others. Just a few.

   "amazing" is the word, alright.

Who's Astley? 

I'd like to add:

Microsoft's Sync Toy 2.1

FileZilla

There's lots of great ones here.  Essentials for me include CCleaner, Revo, Picassa, and definitely LastPass.

That's a pretty weak list of "Must Haves".

15+ is hardly weak.