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I suppose it is a little late to add to this conversation, but the inclusion of numerals > 1 in those throughput numbers eliminates any possibility of them being in base-2. The difference between manufacturer's specs and OS specs is that the manufacturers misleadingly divide the total, base-10 capacity of drives by powers of 10 rather than powers of 2 and inaccurately report the results as megabytes and gigabytes. You can't totally blame them, though, because the computing industry hijacked and bent the metric prefixes kilo- mega- and giga- in the first place.

Well, you could try a combination of SmartFTP and Notepad++

http://www.smartftp.com/
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/

SmartFTP allows you to edit files live. It ftps the selected file down, you edit it in your favourite editor (automatically launched from SmartFTP, of course), SmartFTP automatically detects that the file has changed and ftps it back up again. The overall effect is that you can hit save in Notepad++ then refresh the webpage to see the changes. A very convenient way to break a live website. :)

That's all I can think of for now...how about listing some free (good) games too? :)

BSPlayer for movies, its fast and fairly lightweight. theres free, and non-free versions on the BSPlayer site

SmartFTP - n00b friendly FTP client - free for home/non-commercial use

pretty obvious what the following 3 are:
Apache
MySQL
PHP

PostCast SMTP server

CrapCleaner! cleans crap from your PC! temp files, MRUs, deletes invalid registry stuff. Whenever I use it, it usually free's up ~1GB on my hard drive! quite amazing how much crap there is on XP

Firefox and Thunderbird

SmartFTP is also a pretty nice FTP client that's free for personal use.

• Putty - A free (GPL) SSH terminal emulator
• Winzip - Yeah, you know what this is
• VLC - Free media player
• OpenOffice.org - I should stop doing these descriptions, its not as if youve heard of these things before!
• GIMP for windows - Yup, the infernal/eternal image editor
• Sharpdevelop - Free (GPL) .net IDE, requires the .net framework and SDK
• Bloodshed Dev-C++ - Excellent free (GPL) C and C++ IDE, using the Windows GCC port
• Thunderbird - Mail client
• Firefox - Web browser
• Adobe Acrobat Reader - PDF Reader
• PDFcreator - GPL PDF print driver for windows
• MessengerPro (Clickatell) - Non free SMS sender for windows, company does good bulk buy sms rates, i buy 500 at a time for less than $5
• Lavasoft Adaware and Spybot SS - For the essentials in life
• Topstyle - Free version of the excellent CSS editor for webdevelopment, if anyone knows a good free alternative, im open to suggestions :)
• SmartFTP - Great free for personal use FTP client, not found a better one yet! (I have, Filezilla it is excellent AND fully GPL, none of this non free shit, bub. :-) )
• MySQL-Front - Old version of the MySQL windows front end, much much better than the new one you pay for. Source isnt open and the old developer discontinued development, possibly one of the best advertisements for why OSS is good :(
• Editplus - Possibly the best editor ive found, not free im afraid, costs around $25

VLC -, like you mentioned, Free media player is a great media player, it blew me away. Better then Window's media player, and I know that my porno viewing habits are not going straight to Bill Gates.

One you didn't mention is Filezilla which is a good GPL ftp program instead of SmartFTP if you want to try another one out. (I must confess I use LeechFTP since I haven't gotten use to Filezilla just yet, although if you are into hosting files Filezilla is even better).

1. Mozilla Firefox
2. Microsoft Office
3. PuTTy SSH Client
4. WinRAR (will check out Izarc too)
5. WinAMP
6. POPFile, an Email Filter
7. SmartFTP, gonna FileZilla a try though..
8. IrfanView, a free picture viewer
9. NetTransport download manager, also downloads media streams
10. Windows Media Player 9-- its actually pretty good!

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

I've tried a good deal of the stuff listed. The following are the most intuitive, free, software products I have encountered. They increase productivity, and are stable.

Freeware List: If you can think of it, it's in here.
OpenCD: Precompiled CD with all open source software.
Doom9.org: Famed site for lots of media tools.
Trillian: AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo! IM software all in one.
AVG Anti-Virus: Free AV
SpyBot (Spam Remover): Free Spam Remover/Search & Destroy
Firebird: Web browser w/ adblock & popup control.
FileZilla FTP: FTP Client
Smart FTP: Free Client, better looking, faster
Kerio: Personal Firewall, better than ZoneAlarm
Textpad: Text Editor.
PuTTY: SSH Client.
CygWin: Linux emulation.
FFDshow: DivX/XVid decoder.
TweakUI: Microsoft's famed Powertoy for Windows XP.
WinAce: Fast, high-compression (40% smaller, faster compression than ZIP).
WinAmp: MP3 player, with this skin.
dBpowerAMP: Music Converter (copies CDs to MP3)

One last thing, don't use Outlook. Find a better program: Eudora, Thunderbird, or PegasusMail (in that order) are safer/more powerful. Windows comes bundled with great software, just like Mandrake - but their internet package leaves much (security) to be desired.

Media Player Classic - Windows ol' mplayer2.exe on steorids. Reads DVD, too. Tons of options, thats a must.

Foobar2000 - Created by an ex Winamp developper, its main goal is to be minimalistic. Tired of all those players sucking your ressources just for loading/displaying the skin? Try this.

Irfanview, image viewer, already mentionned

dbPowerAmp Music Converter - audio converter. supported: CDa/mp3/wav/ogg/wma, name em all. To convert, just right-click on the file in the file explorer.

PuTTY, of course

SmartFTP - not minimalistic, but quite complete FTP client

Also, I personally use Microsoft WTS Client to connect to my WindowsXP box. Shame on me. Should i switch to VNC? (I liked the sound feature in XP's :/)

Most of my top ten is already posted, but I swear by FilZip for compression software, and SmartFTP for non-commercial file transfer. Both Windows apps.

Mozilla, powerful and free web browser/mail suite.
OpenOffice, powerful office suite.
Ad-Aware for keeping spyware (Gator etc) out.
BitTorrent for all your P2P needs.
ZomeAlarm a good firewall.
Avast! Antivirus good AV app, free for home use.
TextPad powerful and easy-to-use text editor.
SmartFTP powerful and free FTP client.

On top of these, I always install these non-free apps (non-development related):
Paint Shop Pro all the relevant functionality from Photoshop at a much better price.
Klient the best IRC client. Ever.

Some people have mentioned:
CygWin - a home, non-dev PC doesn't need it
VNC - a home, non-dev PC doesn't need it, and it has security issues
Dev-C++ - not needed on a home PC, it's for development.
NetHack - huh!?
Boingo - the article submitter didn't mention anything about having a WLAN card, so why would he need to find hotspots?
Winamp - redundant since Microsoft released WMP9, which I've found to be just as fast, more stable than WA3, and better at playing movies. Of course, YMMV, and some people prefer to stay away from MS stuff for ideological reasons.

> $40 for an FTP client, $30 for an archiver, ludicrous..

SmartFTP $0
UltimateZip $0

If you don't want to pay for software there are plenty of free alternatives.