1. Irfanview - the world's fastest and best stand-alone image viewer. Now supports some Photoshop filters and has some nice editing features as well. For all around speed and utility, you can't find a better image viewer and basic image editor than Irfanview. Additional plugins let you view flash and other video formats, and listen to several audio formats too. More than just an image viewer, Irfanview is one program that you'll find on every computer we own. Irfanview is free. Get more details about and/or download Irfanview from this site.

2. Roboform - In the age of the cloud, secure passwords are very important - they're essential if you want the information you store "in the cloud" to be secure.  It's hard to remember a bunch of different passwords - and using the same password for everything is one of the worst things you can do. Roboform has a password generator, and will store all your passwords and even fill in login forms for you. It has tons of other useful features too. Roboform offers a free version that allows you to store up to 10 password/username combinations. If you don't have some sort of password manager you need one NOW. If you use your browser to store passwords, you really need one now. Storing passwords in your browser is not very secure. Anyone using your computer can login to anything you can log into. If you're going to store passwords in your browser make sure your browser gives you the option of protecting all your passwords with one master password, like Firefox does. Download Roboform or get more details here.

3. Revo Uninstaller - Our freeware program of the year for 2008 continues to garner accolades from our readers and from download sites all around the Web. A good uninstaller is absolutely necessary these days when programs make 3000 entries in Windows registry and the program's own uninstaller leaves most of them behind - as well as other bits and pieces. Revo Uninstaller is the only uninstaller we know of that will remove most programs completely. Best of all - and we're surprised - Revo Uninstaller is free. This program needs to be on every computer from the very beginning. Go get it here.

4. Paragon Backup and Recovery Free Edition - We can't tell you that how many times people have written us to tell us one of the software programs they've backed-up didn't work on a new computer - or a computer on which Windows has been reinstalled. It's a hard concept to grasp, but, you can't just copy programs and folders and put them on your new computer and expect them to run. There's a lot more to it than that - like registry entries for example. The only way to be completely sure that everything is backed up so you can actually use it if the worst happens is by using a mirror-image - or drive cloning - backup program. Unfortunately, 99% of them are not free, and some are very expensive. But why pay for something when you can get something just as good - and even easier to use! That's our motto. Quick selling Acronis True Image and make a good commission and find something we can tell our readers about that's just as good and free too. See why we're having money troubles? We just can't keep our mouths shut. We have to tell you the truth. The truth is that Paragon Backup & Recovery Free Edition is every bit as good as Acronis. We know it is, we just had to use it two days ago. Save your money, get this program free, make good, reliable mirror-image backups and create a bootable CD or USB flash drive . If big troubles come along and you're computer is fired - or your hard drive goes belly-up, or something else catastrophic happens, just boot up with the Paragon boot flash drive or CD you made and restore your computer completely - without reinstalling Windows or a single program. Your computer will be like nothing ever happened. Really. This program is a huge download - over 100MB. If you have dialup then have a friend on broadband download it for you and send it to you on a USB flash drive or CD. More information - and /or - download from this page.

5. Jarte - Yeh, yeh, we know all about Open Office - a great, free MS Office replacement. But, if you're like TC you don't use Excel, PowerPoint , Access anyway, so why jumble up your computer with all those office programs you don't need and will never use? Just because they're free? You mean if Burger King was giving away hamburgers you'd eat five of them just because they were free? Nah! Say you wouldn't. Anyway, I digress. Jarte is a word processing program that can read and create Word documents in both the old MS Word format and the new. It can also save documents in PDF format, which old uncle Microsoft really hates. Best of all, with Jarte you get a great Word Processor that TC thinks is better than MS Word, ten times faster, a hundred times less complicated;  for creating Word documents it works amazingly well. If you need something that can create tables and what not - or answer the phone for you, Jarte's not going to be your thing. But if you want to create nicely formatted Word documents or you need to open Word documents in either old or new Word format, then Jarte's your cup 'o tea. Learn more about Jarte and download it from here. Jarte is free and it's a lot of word processor packed into just 2.8MB. If you need a lot of fancy features, you can ante up $19.95 for Jarte Plus. We think plain, old Jarte (free) is just fine.

You might have noticed that we didn't include any antivirus, antimalware, or antispyware programs. Of course, you need those too. We thought we'd feature some of the programs we always install on all our new computers first.