Free Software that I like

Free Software:

AVG free Antivirus

Windows Live Messenger

SMPlayer It's better than VLC media player and Media Player Classic. It's able to play the most known video & audio formats without the need of external codecs.

OpenOffice free office suite

GIMP GNU image manipulation program ( Like Adobe Photoshop, but Free )

Foobar2000 Great Free Media Player ( I like this better than Winamp, Itunes, and Windows Media Player )

Opera ( Probably the best Web Browser )

Firefox ( Another great Web Browser )

smartftp, the free secure FTP client for Windows

CCleaner CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool.

Linux Operating System ( Ready to dump windows? )

30 Essential Pieces Of Free (and Open) Software for Windows

If that's not enough to get you started go to The Free Software Foundation ( Tons of Great Stuff Here )

Confirmed: Vista Bug Slows Network Traffic While Music Plays.

I just read this over at PC World's blog. I first read about it a week ago but was waiting on a follow-up and here it is.

A major Microsoft techie, today acknowledged a bug with Vista's network programming that can noticeably slow down file transfers on a local network if you play music at the same time.

No word yet on when we might expect a bug fix, so if you're copying a lot of data between Vista PCs at work or at home, you might want to turn off your tunes for the duration.

Go over to PC World and read the rest.

UPDATE: Read How To Fix the Vista Network Speed Issue While Playing Sound

Clean up duplicate files with CloneSpy

If you have a ton of digital pictures or have a large music collection on your computer, you may wonder whether you've got duplicate files laying around that you could afford to trash. While you can try searching for duplicate filenames using a number of tools including the search functionality that is built in to Windows, to truly know if files are duplicates you need a tool that will examine the bits, and see if they match completely.

CloneSpy is a free little utility that will do just that for you, and it provides enough options to make sure that when you finally do decide to delete some duplicates, it's the right ones that actually get deleted.

Windows Media Player 11 for XP is available for download.

Windows Media Player 11 offers great new ways to store and enjoy all of your digital media. It's easier than ever to access all of your music, video, pictures, and recorded TV on your computer. Play it, view it, organize it, and sync it to a portable device for enjoying on the go, or share with devices around your home - all from one place. Windows Media Player 11 is designed to work with all versions of Windows XP with Service Pack 2, including Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional.

Download size: 24.6MB. This download requires that you are running a genuine copy of Windows and that it passes validation.