Acrobat Viewer - view those all important .PDF files

Bookmark Converter 2.0 - transfer bookmark files between NAV & IE (most versions)

Bulletproof FTP - I have tested 7 of the more popular FTP packages, and this one hits the most FTP sites and gets files more often than the rest.  If you want ease of use,  there are programs like CuteFTP, but if you want the best - this is it

ICQ98 - how everyone on the web contacts friends (too bad my firewall keeps me from having this program on my PC)

Kremlin Encrypt 2.21 - Win95 and WinNT security - uses the best in unbreakable encryption, and secures the machine as well - use it to protect ALL of your free-speech rights - this program is the equivalant of the saftey deposit box at the bank you keep your important papers in.... remember:   Big Brother DOES try to monitor email and internet traffic to certain sites, so if you feel that what you say or do is private, you need an encryption package

Real Audio Player - hear all the underground radio with RAP

Vueprint Pro - a great & easy to use image viewer

Winhacker 95 - the easy way to customize your desktop

Winzip 6.3sr1 - a really easy to use compression program (zip, TAR, lzh, ARC/ARJ, MIME, uuencode/decode,binhex formats are supported) - pretty much handles all the compressed files you are likely to come across

Anawave Websnake - an excellent offline browser - it will download a whole website to your harddrive, for easy browsing later on - I use it to grab the best of the hacker stuff that I come accross

MIRC - the standard in chat programs for those with the need to chat (I don't like to chat much)

HTMLPad - most HTML pros (I am not one of them) use a program like this one to rapidly modify HTML code - while Notepad rules in its own way, there are replacements like HTMLPad that provide so much more flexibility and take up so little space

Editpad - one of the MANY great replacements for Windows Notepad - I recommend replacing notepad if you perform serious text editing (like myself)

Internet Loafer - let say you are on Navagator, and you want to download the latest program from your fav web site - only it is 25MB.  So, you log on at bedtime, start the download, and go to sleep.  You wake up, and it ain't there!!!!!!  Well, your ISP terminated your connection cause you weren't doing anything on the web!!!!  So, you run loafer, it pretends to do stuff for you, and you stay logged on forever!

PGP 5.5.5 - the Pretty Good Privacy freeware program is a great way to send & receive encrypted email.  Use the IDEA algorithm with it, though.  Here is how it works:  you give it your secret password (please use 15 characters for your password or phrase), and it uses your password to create a key.  This key is split into 2 parts - a public key and a private key.   The public key is what you give out to others.  They use this key to encrypt email sent to you.  Once encrypted, only your private key can decrypt it.  You can put the public key into your email signature (although it is really long - like 2 kb of data), post it in your web pages, and even post it to special key servers that store your public key for free so everyone else can look it up.  It is a free program.

BestCrypt NP (or BestCrypt NT) - creates one big (you specify the size) encrypted file.  Then it mounts this file as a virtual hard disk.  You can see it in explorer as a drive letter.  You just read & write to this drive letter like a regular disk (you can open explorer, double-click on your .doc or whatever), then dismount the drive (which closes the file) when you are done.

Password Safe - a must-have program from CounterPane Systems, you use it to store ALL of your passwords in.  That way, you only have to memorize the password to Password Safe, then just open and view your passwords at your leisure.  I cannot imagine trying to keep track of everything without this program.

Netscape Navagator - one of the "big two" in the internet browser market

Internet Explorer - the other of the "big two" in the internet browser market

Keyview Pro - a great little package that will allow you to view, print and even convert between most of the major file types (most word processor, spreadsheet, database, graphics, and compressed file types).  Nothin worse than getting that jucy little tidbit of information in Lotus AMI Pro format, and you only have Word 6.0.  With Keyview Pro, you can view and print almost anything from anyone (except MAC files - die MAC die!!!)

Norton Antivirus - one of the "big two" in the Anti-Virus market - while there are other products out there that remove as many viruses as Norton, NAV (Norton AntiVirus) seems to install and run in REALLY OLD, weird, or just plain f*ed up computers - the other packages don't always do this

Norton Utilities - probably the best known, and most stable, of the OS utility packages.  These are the programs that you wish Microsoft included with Windows - a set of utilities that makes your OS and hard drive much easier to maintain

Microsoft Office Professional 97 - a complete suite of MUST-HAVE apps, that NO ONE can be with-out.  The major competition for Microsoft is the Lotus Suite and the Corel Wordperfect Suite, and these are excellent programs that will do the almost the SAME THING as the Microsoft products, except for their database apps.  If you need database power, Microsoft Access is the way to go...

Microsoft Outlook 98 - the BEST email program on the market today - it is the software that every major corporation is switching to for email - you should have 32MB of RAM to use it

Adobe Photoshop - a photo and image manipulator - it is the standard by which others are judged

Microsoft Frontpage 98 - a GREAT internet web page design program for beginners and experts alike.  Here is some advertising straight from Microsoft's WebSite on Frontpage.   Yep, as you can tell, I love this product.  Too bad it came from a Bill Gates company.

FrontPage Themes provide you with backgrounds, bullets, banners, hyperlinks
and navigation bars that give your site a professional and consistent
appearance.

Table Drawing Tools let you quickly and precisely layout the design of your
Web page using the equivalent of a pencil and an eraser.

Navigation View lets you create and manage the navigational structure of your
Web site within seconds. You can even print a map of your entire site.

Navigation Bars add universal navigation to your Web site based on your site’s
structure. Just specify the levels and hyperlink style you wish, and FrontPage
98 will automatically create the Navigation Bars for you. If you modify the
structure of your site your navigation bars will be automatically updated.

Shared Borders, allow you to specify shared headers and footers (horizontal or
vertical) across the pages in your site and provide you with flexibility in creating
a consistently designed Web site.

Form Save Results FrontPage Component, allows you to easily create a
form that will send submissions directly to an e-mail address. of your choosing
without complex programming.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) define styles for titles, paragraphs, headers,
and more, so you can create extensive and consistent page layout settings.

Hover Buttons add life to your Web page so that, when a user "hovers" over
the button or clicks on it, it will change colors, change shape, or animate any
way you choose.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 and Netscape Communicator Integration
give you the ability to edit Web site pages from within your browser using
FrontPage.

The CDF Channel Definition Format (CDF) Wizard quickly turns Web sites
into a "channel" that users can "subscribe" to for automatic delivery to any
desktop running Internet Explorer 4.0.

Improved Table Editing gives you Drag & Drop functionality to move or copy
your table rows and columns and to resize rows and columns.

Improved WYSIWYG Frame Set Editing simplifies the creation of frames
from templates and allows you to customize your own frame-based sites.
FrontPage 98 also makes it easy to edit pages and frame sets directly on the
screen.

Improved Form Save Results gives you an intuitive and streamlined user
interface with more power and control so that you can easily set up how forms
are processed.

Easier Hyperlinks simplifies the process of linking to new or, existing pages,
e-mail addresses, bookmarks, and targets within frame sets.

Improved Image Editing Tools in the FrontPage Editor make it easy for you
to bevel, crop, flip, rotate, or automatically washout images. FrontPage 98 also
lets you shrink an image to reduce download time.

Editor Views Tabs let you quickly toggle between views of your Web page
including Normal Editing view, the improved HTML Code view, and the new
Preview view that lets you view your Web pages in browser mode from within
the Editor. When a frameset is loaded in the Editor, two additional tabs give you
easy access to your frame set HTML code and the alternate "No Frames" Web
page that users with frames-incompatible browsers will see when visiting your
page.

One-button Web Publishing saves file transfer time and simplifies publishing
to your web by only publishing modified or new files and will automatically
detect changes made by others in a multi-user environment.

The Improved Web Publishing Wizard helps you publish your FrontPage
Web to servers that do not run the FrontPage Server Extensions. The wizard is
smart enough to forestall the most common errors that can occur when
publishing your Web using alternate publishing methods.

Performance Improvements in FrontPage 98 increase boot speed, page save
speed, and time to open a Web.

Enhanced Support for "Hand-coded" HTML preserves more hand formatting
of HTML code and includes better auto-formatting algorithms that make the
generated HTML code easier to read.