You can find more Essential Apps at the Essential Apps page (which was added at some point after this post was created).
Due to my adventurous nature (along with hardware failures, indecision and general turmoil) I’ve had the opportunity to load some Microsoft OS’s over a dozen times in the past month on my own equipment. Windows 7 twice, a Vista and a bunch of XPs. Oh, and a handful of Linux distributions as well, now that I think about it.
Regardless of the operating system, I’ve come to realize there are a handful of applications that I make sure are loaded and configured before anything else. And one or two that I’ve always traditionally installed but don’t use as much.
Without further ado:
Evernote – My digital memory. I do my GTD’ish stuff here. I use it to manage projects, future projects and it has even replaced my bookmarking services (like Delicious). Once it has been installed and synchronized I’m pretty much ready to go. Even works tolerably well on Linux via Wine.
Dropbox – Among other things, Dropbox has largely replaced USB keys for me. I keep useful applications and current project working documents here. It syncs them too all my machines and offers access to them via browser as well. Very handy when on a strange machine, I can still get to my stuff from a browser.
Note: That’s a referral link to Dropbox. If you use it to sign-up, it gets me a bit of space and doesn’t impact you at all. If you haven’t tried it out yet, give it a shot 
Firefox – Not necessarily always my favorite web browser, but the one that offers the most options and extendibility. I could probably write another entire post on the current crop of add-ons and themes – and perhaps I will.
Paint.NET—On the Windows machines, my favorite image editor by far.
Digsby – This is a recent addition but I’ve been using it quite a bit this year so it seems to have earned a spot. A nice little app that can be used for IM, mail notifying and even the “main” social networking sites. Not always the most svelte, but for the functionality it is the one I tend to turn to.
When running Linux I use Pidgin for IM.
Now, there are quite a few other applications that might go onto a given machine depending on how (and where) it’ll be used, but those are definitely the core to all of my machines.
What are yours?
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May 24th, 2009 
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Consumer Reports most recent issue had some freeware suggestions for a security suite sort of cobbled together. The thing is, they were rated at least as high, and often higher than the for-pay alternatives they were replacing… but they’re for Windows machines. Are any of the three software programs you’ve used? (I know one is because I used and liked it)
The three programs were:
anti-virus: avira antivirus
Microsoft Windows Defender
and
spamfighter, which I don’t use because I use gmail.
It doesn’t list a firewall freeware alternative which surprised me, but I’m a zonealarm fan from way back.
I’m asking this stuff because I’m going to start a smartypig savings account for a new laptop soon since I believe windows 7 upgrades will start coming out for laptops in the fall or thereabouts and I want to be ready to jump on that bandwagon.
Heyas Rich.
I’ve been running Avira on my home desktop for the past year (aside from a few months when it was Ubuntu). Seems to do a decent job and I have no real complaints. It pops an ad thing after each update, but that doesn’t really bother me (it IS free after all…) (and yeah, a simple hack will kill that too).
I install Defender on all the XP machines at the office. I can’t prove it does a decent job, but we have, what seems to me, a very low infection rate these days so I think it helps.
Both of those seem to be reasonably light-weight too, which doesn’t hurt when you’re herding the antiques that I run
I’m currently testing out the free comodo firewall and AV on my personal business laptop. (http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/) So far, no complaints, but only a few weeks into it so far… The newer versions of ZA left me feeling a bit cold.
You’re the second person to say that about ZA and also mentioned going to Comodo after ditching ZA after their last update. Good to know going in. I’m starting to mentally assemble the software for the laptop (and by mentally I mean in evernote of course!)
I think it would be cool if I could make an evernote public, or share it with specific people other than by e-mailing it.
You can “publish” notebooks in evernote — that would be like making it public I think.
Far as I can tell, you have to go to the website to do it.
Select the notebook, then click “edit” (below the list of notebooks) and choose Properties. Check a box, note the URL and you have a public notebook
I couldn’t live without CDex (CD ripper)
Either Itunes or music match for playing music
Open office
A DVD burner software (which is best?)
A file compressor/decompresser WinRar/Winzip are both nagware so haven’t found the best yet.
Have you used Microsoft’s latest security software offering?
Have you tried setting up prefs.yaml file in Digsby to share skins and chat logs across machines using DropBox? Keeps the threads together. Google “Disgsby Dropbox”
Compression – try 7-zip – better faster cheaper (free) than any other – Adobe is even using it for online install cabs.