Decided to post a large list of all the programs I find really helpful in my day to day use of the compooter. Share your own or share something even better here if you know it.
1. 7-Zip
Really great file archiver. Can read, create, and edit a massive load of formats from .iso to .rar. My only complaint with it actually is that you can't open images in it. You gotta extract them first.
2. Audacity
A program for recording and editing all sound files. If there's problems with a certain music/sound file or I just want to edit it, I use this. Also use it as a last resort to get songs playing from the internet onto my computer by recording what the speakers are playing. Make sure you get the LAME encoder to work with MP3 files though.
3. Bittorrent
A program for downloading torrents. Not much that needs to be said here.
4. Daemon Tools Lite
Program for mounting and running .iso's and other disc images. If you're any sort of game pirate at all, you're gonna need something like this.
5. Search Everything
I have a massive folder of awesome and funny pictures but the problem is, when you want to find one of them, Windows Search just blows. This simple but powerful search program fixes that. However, to be fair, for search needs besides the images I have, Windows Search does a decent enough job so this may not be for everyone.
6. Foxit Reader
For reading PDF's. Actually I had a good reason for using this over Adobe's but I can't remember exactly why anymore. Sorry, I know that's really unhelpful. But anyway, it's pretty darn solid and I highly recommend it all the same if you're looking for a replacement for Adobe's.
7. Google Chrome
I've tried Firefox for a while but a bunch of small things about it just really didn't go well with me. I think the final thing that pushed me in favor of Chrome though was the omnibox. (Chrome's address bar) Simply type your search terms and google will immediately plug it into its search engine and give you the results. Very handy. Firefox didn't have a plugin that could do this last time I looked so I switched in the end.
8. HexChat
IRC client. I used to use XChat until I realized that you had to pay for that nonsense and then promptly switched over to this which is pretty much the same program except free. Either way, very nice IRC client.
9. LibreOffice
It was a toss up between this and OpenOffice. In the end, I just went with LibreOffice though. If anyone knows a significant advantage that OpenOffice has over LibreOffice, I'd love to know.
10. Paint.NET
It's basically MS Paint turned up to 11. It's simple enough to where new users can quickly understand it, but flexible enough to where it can scale according to your needs. It's very moddable too and there's literally hundreds of useful plugins people have made for it. If you do anything with images at all though, I'd definitely recommend this.
11. VLC Media Player
It's deceptively simple looking, but underneath, it's pretty darn powerful. Not very strong in terms of Library support or anything like that but it can play just about any media format you can throw at it. Although I must say, Windows Media Player has definitely gotten a lot better over the ages so I can safely recommend that as well if you don't care too much about functionality.
