I have been using computers for the past 11 years in some way or another and in that time I have rebuilt my own computers and those of many others who found out my secret trade. In the past month I reloaded my laptop twice (once for hard drive failure and the other was due to infection).
In the years since I went 100% legit (no cracked software of any kind) I have been able to find decent cost effective software to meet my needs. These are must haves for installation on any Windows desktop.
Antivirus
This one could be up for debate, but I prefer Avast! Home Edition if I must install an Antivirus and depending the performance of the machine I may not install one at all.
Web Browser
Mozilla Firefox gets installed on every machine I rebuild with the Flash and Acrobat plugins. As well I always set it as the default browser and remove the Internet Explorer link from everywhere except the one hidden in programs menu. This has probably costed me business, because they do not need to come back, but I think it is worth it.
CD/DVD Burning
Since I only burn data discs and ISOs there are a few options, but the best by far I discovered a few months ago is DeepBurner. The free edition does everything I need and on the plus side if I want the extra features licensing is only 25.00, as opposed to 95.00 for a full suite of applications I will never use (I was a die hard Nero fan before it became bloatware).
Text Editor
Since I am a web developer and have a deep dislike for WYSIWYG web page editors I write everything from the ground up using jEdit. Way back in the day I went on a search for the most flexible and smooth operating text editor that supported HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP syntax highlighting. jEdit was the winner by far with flexibility to do pretty much anything and a vast array of plugins. I have looked a few times to change it update since I spend everyday looking at this application, but have not been able to find a suitable replacement.
The #2 text editor I usually install is Notepad++, which I use as a Notepad replacement since it supports simple things like Unix style like escaping :)
Office Suite
In the last two versions of OpenOffice.org it so close to the Microsoft Suite that I could drop it on someones computer and they would not even notice the difference. If there is no Microsoft Office license onsite this one gets installed without a thought. Interest enough I bought Office 2007 - Enterprise a few months ago from work, only having to pay the shipping, but under normal circumstances I would not think twice.
Archiving/Compression
A few months ago I finally got sick of 7 years of WinRAR evaluation popups and decided to seek out a less costly solution and found 7Zip. It was a drop in replacement, except that it did not support RAR, but that is something I can live without since 7z has a better compression ratio and supports all my favorite Linux formats (BZip2, Tar, GZip).
Media Player - Video
A few months ago I discovered VLC Media player and the only thing I have been not able to play is DRM protected content. It supports almost everything and is light weight so there the memory foot print is small.
Media Player - Audio
I have not installed this recently since all my music is on my iPod, but FooBar2000 is a flexible and again light weight media player that will not cause your computer to chug when changing songs.
Graphics
GIMP is not quite PhotoShop (which I use at work), but it is close enough for my designing needs.
To be honest I only thought of GIMP when I was going to take a screenshot for this post and did not have it installed yet.
Remote Control
I have been using a VNC on my main machine for years, but four years ago I switched to UltraVNC and it has replaced my previous use of PC AnyWhere with support for file transfer and the requirement of only one open router port.
File Transfer
If a FTP client is a requirement (which it is for me) I opt for FileZilla (which runs on Linux as well) which supports SFTP and FTP protocols. In the recent releases they dropped the dependency on PuTTY so the memory foot print is fairly small.
.Net IDE
I will now mention a few development tools that have saved me some dollars over the years. The first is SharpDevelop which is now almost a drop in replacement for Visual Studio C# development.
Source Code/Versioning
I have used subversion for the past few years as well as the TortoiseSVN Windows client to make sure my screw ups can be easily rolled back.
These are my essentials and the best part about they are all viable cost effective alternatives to their commercial counterparts.
