Free Programs! (Does it get any better?)

Everybody loves free stuff. I know I do. So why pay so much for fancy smancy tools when there are so many good freebies lying around the web?

Web Browsers:
Mozilla Firefox - Practically the standard these days.
Opera - Fast, customizable browser with a buttload of widgets.
(Check out my article on these web browsers here.)

Media Players:
foobar2000 - Best for those who know a bit of programming.
VLC Player - Plays pretty much everything (.avi, .mkv, .ogg....)
QT Alternative - Quicktime alternative (gosh I hate Quicktime)
WinAmp - A good free player that you can customize pretty easy.

Email
Thunderbird - Mozilla's e-mail client.

Instant Messengers
Windows Live - Lots of things to customize. Good for video calls.
AOL Instant Messenger - Fun and dandy and popular.
Yahoo Instant Messenger - Not the most popular, but it's up there.
ICQ - I don't use it, but hey it's out there.
Trillian - Use your AIM, Yahoo, etc. accounts at one time!

Illustration
GIMP - a great freebie to use instead of Photoshop
Paint.NET - a little weird, but good for digital art
openCanvas - I'll be hosting this as soon as I find a site that will

Anti-Virus
AVG Anti-Virus - I use this. Good stuff.

Anti-Spyware
Spybot Search & Destroy - My favorite.
Ad-Aware - Very good freeware.

Web Design
EditPad Lite - Notepad's older sibling. Easy to use.
NVu - Not my favorite, but still a good program. Replacement for Dreamweaver.

FTP Clients
FreeFTP - Great stuff, but not compatible with Vista.
CoreFTP - I have yet to try this one out.
Filezilla - Yeah, haven't used this one. Heard good things.

Other Good Stuff
IfranView - Enables the viewing of all sorts of files, from GIF to JPEG to PDF.
WinRAR - Good archiving/.zip file program
OpenOffice - Great alternative to Microsoft Word.