These are what you would call my favorite applications and ones that I’ve found to be extremely useful. I work in a position where I do many different tasks and I need to be able to do things efficiently of I can’t get everything done in a business day. These are programs that I’ll have either with me or installed on the PC I work with; no exceptions.

Personal Information Managers (shareware)

MyNotesKeeper
For all those loose bits of information lying around and never get filed away, get MYNOTESKEEPER. I can’t say enough about it.
Screenshots

Repetitive Text/Phrases

PhraseExpress

For those persons who write things over and over and over and it’s always the same thing, same word and conveying the same information, get PhraseExpress. Or try Texter (freeware and portable)

http://www.phraseexpress.com/

HotKeyz (freeware)

I am a keyboard fanatic and work is something I am really allergic to. So keyboards and shortcut are essential to my life and getting things done.

http://www.skynergy.com/hotkeyz.html

Screen/Image Capture (freeware)

Sometimes capturing images for documentation is a hassle, but not with this program. It can capture bunches of images and then later go back and get them when your ready to write the documentation.

http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/screenshotcaptor/

Anti-Virus Protection(freeware)

Nice AV Package, auto-updates and doesn’t kill the system on resource requirements.

http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html

Instant Messaging (freeware)

What can I say Pidgin does it for me, all the IM formats all the time. I need not for the video conferencing and fancy graphical stuff, just the IM basics. Pidgin flies good with me.

http://www.pidgin.im/

Web Browsers (freeware)

Yeah, yeah. So I go on and on about Firefox, but it’s the best. It’s fast secure, updated regularly, has tons of plug-ins and it’s portable.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/?from=getfirefox

Remote Desktop Access (freeware)

UltraVNC is the standard for remote access and if you want it free. If an IT person and you have to go to multiple locations still to work on PC’s your working too hard. With this you can sit at your PC, connect in to someone elses PC [like your there] and resolve/update and be done.

http://www.uvnc.com/

Office Application Requirements (freeware)

No PC should be without a office package and basic word processing. Open Office does this with ease and it never hits your wallet. Looks like the old office interface [that everyone's used to] and it does as advertised. Don’t waste your time with Microsoft Office. OO handles the meat and potatoes and Thunderbird can handle the Email.

http://www.openoffice.org/

File Compression (freeware)

There’s lots of file compressions out there and some can be argued all day on who’s the better compression, but the best argument is who can do it and handle all of them. 7ZIP does it very well and has a right click context menu interface with explorer.

http://www.7-zip.org/

PDF Handling (Creating and Viewing) (freeware)

PDF is the defacto standard in the web and IT industry, but Adobe isn’t the end all be all program to do this. Other programs do this and do this well and at smaller file size too.

PDF Creation

PDF Creation is easy with PDFCreator. It installs as a system printer and you can create PDFs as easy as you can print.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/?abmode=1

PDF Viewer

Viewing a PDF is an absolute requirement. You can’t do much on the web for research if you can’t read/open a PDF; most companies list/provide their manuals in a PDF format. Adobe again isn’t the best solution for this [many programs can view PDF's], but I personally go with XChange-PDF Viewer. It’s small, it’s fast and portable. It allows for opening, data entry and saving the PDF with comments [and more!].

http://www.docu-track.com/downloads/users/