My favorite programs

To my favorite programs include both commercial and freeware programs.

Antivirus

Free and payed version of Avira AntiVir

AntiVir is very effective and lightweight antivirus. I have used different versions of it more than 5 years.

Firewall

Free version of Comodo Firewall Pro

This firewall has beaten many commercial ones in leaktests and is very lightweight.
In addition to just firewall, it has also Comodo Anti-Virus as on-demand scanner and Defense+-feature as HIPS.
2000/XP/Vista.

Anti-spyware programs

Free version of SUPERAntiSpyware
Free version of Spybot - Search and Destroy
Free version of AVG anti-spyware

Multi purpose support utility
Free and commercial version of WinPatrol

Burning tools
BurnAware Free Edition

Easy-to-use and lightweight burning software.

Features below:

* Absolutely FREE. No spyware, no adware, no banners
* Writes to all CD/DVD media types including Blu-Ray (BD-R/BD-RE)
* Writes discs from disc images
* Writes DVDs from DVD-Video files
* Writes Audio CDs from WAV, MP3, or WMA files
* Creates disc images
* Supports all current hardware interfaces
* On-the-fly writing for all image types
* Writes Multi-Session to all supported media formats
* Auto-verification of written files
* Supports unicode for multi-byte languages
* Clean, flexible, easy to use interface
* Supports Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista (32 and 64 Bit)

Cleaner tools

CCleaner Cleans both temporary files and registry (free)
ATF-Cleaner
Free temporary file cleaner (XP/2000/Vista)

Data backup and disk management

Acronis True Image (commercial)

Acronis Disk Director Suite (commercial)

Screen capture

SnagIt (commercial)

Using SnagIt, you can select and capture anything on your screen, then easily add text, arrows, or effects, and save the screen capture to a file or share it immediately by e-mail or IM.

Defragment

Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premium (commercial)

DisKeeper runs here silently on background with automatic defragmentation and does it using low CPU priority resources.

Easy to use with nice amount of options and good Help file/documentation.

Media players

Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra (commercial)

VLC media player (free)

Web site update checker

Website-Watcher (commercial)

* Monitor web pages
* Monitor password protected pages
* Monitor forums for new postings and replies
* Monitor RSS feeds, Newsgroups and local files
* Highlight changes in a page
* Powerful filter system to ignore unwanted content

Browser

Mozilla FireFox

Email client

Mozilla ThunderBird

Download manager

GetRight Professional (commercial)

Orbit Downloader (free)