What Applicatations are must haves?

[Duke9023]

I have Windows Vista Home Basic 32 Bit. I know nothing special. But next week I plan on making a huge investment and buying a Dell Inspiron 570 Desktop PC with 23" Monitor, AMD Athlon II X4 Processor 630 & Windows 7 Home Premium. My question is what are some must have applications I need to download from the internet and what are some programs I should pick up and best buy when I get the computer. I mostly use my computer for downloading music, downloading music, Uploading a lot of pictures, and burning lots of CD's and DVD's. Any recommendations would help me out.

[AlBags]

Have a look at the VSO website for a start .. You may need ConvertX for converting and burning DVD.
Zoom Player or Gom for playing DVD's.
Winamp Pro for music.
Irfan View for viewing pictures, Corel Paint Shop Pro or Adobe
Elements for mods.
Burrrn for burning CD from any format.

Just a few.

MS Office, too.
Nero Cover designer good for labels, but there are others.

Norton AV is my favourite at the moment.
and Antibytes, too.

[Buenchico]

The most popular (free) antivirus program around here seems to be AVG. Avira is also frequently recommended.

The most popular (free) firewall is probably Zone Alarm Free edition. Comodo also has a lot of fans.

Many people would recommend having both Spybot Search & Destroy, as well as Adaware, on any PC. (They're both free anti-malware programs). Malwarebytes is another good program in this area (and possibly the best).

IrfanView is the best free picture viewing program, which is also good for basic image manipulation. For the nearest free equivalent to Photoshop, use GIMP. There are also lots of free goodies here:
http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/

Windows Media Player is reasonably good at playing and organising audio files but there are two free video players which far outclass it. I recommend having both VLC and GOM on your PC.

Audacity is by far the most popular (free) audio editing program.

TheSage is a (free) really handy little dictionary.

Free&Easy Font Viewer is a lovely little utility which lets you quickly choose an appropriate font for any application.

Firefox is a vastly superior web browser to Internet Explorer.

Chris