im on holidays and bored so at the moment i am trying to compile a list of useful utilities.
this site:
http://topcc.org/utilities.html has a lot of good links to programs on it
so far:
spybot search and destroy
lavasoft adaware
Acrobat reader
Core FTP
http://www.download.com/Core-FTP-Lit...ml?tag=lst-0-1
Firefox
http://www.mozilla.org/
Hijackthis
http://www.spychecker.com/program/hijackthis.html
Sandra
http://www.download.com/SANDRA-Lite/...ml?tag=lst-0-1
(sandra is an awesome program which monitors pretty much your entire computer. it also has benchmarking capabilities)
Trillian
www.ceruleanstudios.com
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winzip and winrar
zonealarm