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Seems no one is giving serious answers so i guess i will be the only one

Freeware or open source software:
01. Firefox, http://www.getfirefox.com/
02. Winamp, http://www.winamp.com/
03. Miranda, http://www.miranda-im.org/
04. Media Player Classic, http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli
05. ffdshow, http://www.free-codecs.com/download/FFDShow.htm
06. CDBurnerXp Pro, http://www.cdburnerxp.se/
07. Daemon-tools, http://www.daemon-tools.cc/
08. uTorrent, http://www.utorrent.com/
09. XnView, http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enhome.htm l
10. ExactAudioCopy, http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
11. Dev-C++, http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html
12. 7-zip, http://www.7-zip.org/
13. Real Alternative, http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternati ve.htm
14. QuickTime Alternative, http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alte rnative.htm
15. Process Explorer, http://www.sysinternals.com/utilities/processexplo rer.html
16. Uniform Server, http://www.uniformserver.com/
17. nLite, http://www.nliteos.com/ (sp+hotfix+driver slipstreaming and ability to remove almost anything from the windows installation disc, including wmp, ie, drivers, services, etc, you can get your windows install disc down to 180MB with a 70MB RAM footprint after boot).

Commercial/Shareware software.
01. NOD32, http://www.nod32.com/ - simply the best antivirus software out there
02. Cinema4D, http://www.maxoncomputer.com/ Great modelling/rendering program (also available for OS X)
03. mIRC, http://www.mirc.com/ not the best irc client, but it has a tiny memory footprint/feature ratio
04. Directory Opus, http://www.gpsoft.com.au/ replace Explorer with a far better file manager.
05. UltraEdit, http://www.ultraedit.com/ great editor for many textbased formats
06. Visual Studio, http://microsoft.com/
07. Nero Burning ROM. http://www.ahead.de/ my burning program of choice

The German company Nero, developers of the award-winning Nero Burning ROM suite for windows...

I may be mistaken, but isn't Nero Burning ROM made by Ahead software? And Nero is the product.

if you go to http://www.ahead.de/en/index2.htm you get redirected to Nero.com, but that's still ahead softwares website.

Or on a news for nerds site, the editors don't need to be nerds and be aware of this?

Considering the frequency with which I reinstall, here's my list for Windows (post-driver updates):

Mozilla Firefox - a must. even if it's not a necessity straight off as a browser, popup blocking makes it worth having immediately.
Trillian - what friends don't enjoy the logging on and off every 2 minutes as you have to reboot your comp for new settings to take place
SmartFTP - as a web developer this is a must, can't pretend to work without an FTP client.
Winamp (5) - I use it for everything media now. I'm an addict.
WinRAR - I know it's shareware but I still like it's ease of use and modifications to the Windows context menus.
Nero - my burning software of choice
ConTEXT - my editor of choice; see SmartFTP
Google Toolbar - unfortunately, I end up doing a lot of testing in IE and without this, I might as well kiss my peaceful browsing goodbye.
Spybot Search & Destroy - not so much of a necessity immediately, but the immunization qualities are great to set up from the get-go
Ad Aware - see Spybot

Very true. Of course, any $30 cd-burner these days comes with Nero for free.

I am so glad Ahead, rather than Roxio, made friends with all those cheap white-box CD-RW distributers. That Roxio program is the crap.

1. foobar 2000 for music playback without Winamp's awful tiny unintuitive UI and with plenty of features to keep any audio-lover happy.
2. Media Player Classic - A great, lightweight but featureful WMP6-alike.
3. For more advanced users, PenguiNet - a lovely Windows SSH/telnet client. Not as lightweight or free as PuTTY, but more intuitive, and has my name on it :)
4. Something addictive.
5. Opera and/or Firebird.. must wean all those users off IE.
6. DScaler - I'm yet to find a better TV Card app. Lightweight, stable, and Free.
7. DigiGuide - Excellent TV guide, in the UK at least.
8. WinRar - as vital for Windows as gzip is for *ix.
9. Nero - Must-have CD-RW software.
10. Ad-Aware and friends.

I suggest getting Nero and using the Nero Disk speed tool.

I use this in my drive and I don't notice any kind of increase in load times(I throttle my 48x drive down to 20x cause it's so friggin loud)

You could always mount a cd-rw with packet writing software (I recommend incd for windows) and set that as your download directory.

Perhaps you forgot to get the Nero WMA 2.0 Decoding plugin which allows WMA decoding.

Strange ... I have had problems with Roxio EasyCD 5 (*) where the only way to get the software to WORK was to reinstall IE5.5.

(*) I personally have ditched EasyCD because I bought(**) Nero several weeks ago which is worlds better and have never had any buffer problems. These roxio problems were on a client's machine.

(**) Yes, I actually spent money on Nero and did not find a pirated serial somewhere. This program is worth the money and it is not overpriced, therefore I pay for it.

"BTW per tests someone did (story posted here a while back), 52x or so is the practical top limit due to CD media shrapneling itself at around 56x."

Limitations will be overcome by sidestepping the problem. Every now and then we also see an article about how the physical limits of magnets have been reached but HDD mfgrs keep coming out with bigger drives. Sooner or later some manufacturer will use more lasers or spin the laser in the opposite direction of the disc to obtain a higher speed. (***) They could even allow people with hordes of RAM to cache the disc image on a RAM disk thus eliminating any IDE related problems.

(***) Yes, I did come up with this idea as I was typing this post. I did not copy it from somewhere.

The lack of 2d hardware acceleration and goofy GUI are just about the worst things in the world for anyone deep into profesional print, web or multimedia design.

Goofier than the default cartoony interface that XP comes with?

The only negatives I see so far is the lack of right button and scroll wheel (easily fixed with a usb mouse which I will get if I can find one as cool looking as the shipped mouse), and the fact I paniced it once mucking with smb_util mounting several volumes on my w2k server in the basement.

I got the DVD-R drive and intend to play with that soon. I have a PVR on my 2 GHZ Dell and it re-encodes mpeg a/v at about 2X real time, so I'm curious to see how this 800 MHz G4 does with something like that...

On that topic, anyone know of any decent mpeg editing tools and something like Nero on the Mac? (Don't mention Toaster, I hate roxio due to headaches experienced with their crap under XP.) If not, I'll have to wait for Nero for the Mac, which according to their home page should be sometime in Q2 (read: June 30).

The author of this review also spends quite a bit of time kvetching about the writing software that comes with burners. My advice? Junk it all! Get a copy of Nero. It supports XP, DVD drives, rewritable CDs and DVDs, and has a packet-writing software avaliable. It's also bloody fast and astoundingly reliable. (Blatent Plug, but it's true.)

I believe that this is the one bundled in the PowerMacs.

Since it burns DVD-R at 2x, DVD-RW at 1x, CDR at 8x, and CD-RW at 4x, and is available for what looks like a relatively cheap price right now, it looks like what I'd put on my christmas list. :-)

Especially since Nero now supports burning VideoCD (mpeg1) and MPEG2 DVDs.

But what about Ahead Software who makes Nero Burning ROM software. Guess they're screwed, huh?

Easy CD Creator probably installed an association with .ISO files; your friend should be able to just double click the image files.

Alternative approach: Start Easy CD Creator; from the File menu, select Build CD From CD Image; change the image type from .CIF to .ISO (the least intuitive step); navigate until you find the image file.

I've burned Red Hat 7.0 and 7.1 CD sets, and a SuSE 7.0 CD, this way. I think they were bootable.

I've also burned CDs this way based on my own ISO images (created with mkisofs; Joliet, autorun on NT, plus Solaris package format), for versions 2.0 and 3.0 of the product I work on.

This list of functions for Nero (Burning Rom) leads me to believe it can do the same thing.

This is a solution in search of a boycott. Besides, Easy CD Creator sucks anyway. Let them cripple it, it deserves to lose even more market share.

This is a solution in search of a boycott. Besides, Easy CD Creator sucks anyway. Let them cripple it, it deserves to lose even more market share.

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As another idea, how about Nero Burning ROM's "ignore illegal TOC type" option? Or CloneCD, or ddump?

That's just on Windows - dd if=/dev/cdrom of=image.raw would probably work correctly, when combined with cdrecord, cdrdao and company.

Remember, this is Macrovision - the company responsible for the SafeDisc CD game protection system [thank you BlindRead]and their infamous video mechanism. I have a DVD card in my PC, and only RF output into my TV. So video out has to go through my VCR's SCART, and so I have to crack my Creative DXR3 to remove Macrovision. In doing so, I happen to come across an ability to pirate my DVDs to VHS - something I don't want to do.

All copy protection ever does is hassle the legitimate user. The big pirates found ways around Macrovision almost as soon as the system came out. It's the same with their game copy protection as well - you can just patch the game. It'll be the same here. Only the consumer will lose.