I recently got a new laptop, nothing fancy, but it needed some tools to be really useful. This is the list that I came up with and it’s just as useful for desktops:

• PC Decrapifier – Get rid of the preloaded junk so we can make room for the good stuff
• 
  – You have to have Firefox right?
• Notepad++ – Great replacement for Notepad, particularly good for programmers

• Open Office – It’s not MS Office, but it’s amazingly close and amazingly free

• GIMP – It’s not Photoshop, but still very powerful and useful, and again free
• Picasa – Easy and free photo organization if you plan to store pictures on your laptop
• Itunes – Even if you don’t have an Ipod it’s a good organizer and makes burning easy
• Filezilla – Free and secure FTP program, if you like that kind of thing
• UltraVNC – Computer Remote Control and Vista compatible
• IZArc – Free zip/unzip program
• AVG -Free antivirus
• XAMPP – Free WAMP webserver. Easy to setup to build and test webpages locally.