Open Office is a Free Microsoft Office alternative published by Sun Microsystems that is compatible with Microsoft Office tools such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc.

Mozilla offers Foxfire and Thunderbird as free downloads.

I use Firefox instead of Microsoft Internet Explorer as my default Browser. Be sure to check out the cool attachments you can get for it....all free of course.

I prefer Thunderbird to Microsoft Outlook as my email client. It greatly lessens your chances of getting or passing along email viruses since practically all email viruses are written for Outlook.

When Outlook sends email in "rich text" format, most other email clients just get a winmail.dat file instead of the intended attachments. To solve that problem I use a Winmail.dat Converter. You can read a more in depth explanation of the subject at www.biblet.freeserve.co.uk

Avast AntiVirus is a FREE to use for home use and has worked great for me for over a year now.

FileHippo.com/ has a bunch of free downloads of true freeware. I got a copy of CCleaner there and used it to clean out a bunch of things on my computer. They also seem to have some free spyware removal software that I need to evaluate also.

THIS WORKS GREAT FOR GETTING RID OF POPUPS
Pollock has a text file that you can copy onto your hard drive that will block ALL popups that you are getting. I comes with easy instructions and a list of hundreds of known sites and easy instructions on how to ad d any sites not covered. I have been using it for 2 years now and it works Incredibly well.