Recommendations: Windows Software

You can tell a lot about a Windows system by how many icons are on its desktop and how many things show up in the bottom-right hand bar section showing background programs. Since every piece of software you install on a Windows machine is adding one more way for the entire system to fail permanently, I don't install a whole lot of things. This list covers the short list of basic system-related software I trust to install. Included are a number of small programs I find helpful for keeping a Windows desktop running. Trust me on this: if it doesn't make my life easier and my desktop more stable rather than less, I don't install it.

StartupMonitor: totally essential utility. Lets you know every time some program tries to install itself to run at startup and allows you to prevent it. Mike Lin's other software is great too; Startup Control Panel lets you clean out PCs that weren't protected from excess processes from day one, Clipomatic is a great little clipboard manager. StartupMonitor will save you from all kinds of useless crap. For example: I use the RealPlayer periodically to view video clips. Once you start that program, it launches a program named realsched.exe in the background that tries to install Real's stupid scheduling program at system startup. It does this every day until you shut your computer down or kill the scheduler process. The only reason I know this is because StartupMonitor kept nagging me about their program trying to start itself automatically.
Ad-Aware. Even if you use another browser most of the time, in order to fully utilize Windows Update you need to keep your copy of Internet Explorer clean of spyware. Nothing does that better than Ad-Aware. Some people also like running Spybot S&D in addition to Ad-Aware, I have found that to be a waste of my time.
Additional anti-spyware measures: some more notes on spyware since it's now by far the #1 thing I have to fix on other people's computers. The really nasty stuff nowadays infects your computer via one of the security holes that Microsoft has no fix for. This means that you all you have to do is visit a spyware infecting site once and it's on your PC. Since some of the criminals involved in this have registered common typo domain sites, this means that no amount of vigilance or PC saavy can keep you safe if you're using Internet Explorer: a single typo of a popular site that lands you at a differnet spot than you intended can now infect your system. The worst of the PC spyware that shows up regularly is Cool Web Search (CWS) and its evil twin Home Search Assistant. The main symptom is that whenever you start IE, your browser is hijaaked so that the location bar reads "about:blank: and you have a screen filled with ads for their sites. Removing this software by hand is the most difficult PC support task I have ever tried (and failed!) to do. The "Home Search Assistant Removal Guide" at short-media gives a feel for how hard this is to do--there are DLL files that randomly rename themselves so that removing them is like some sort of e-whack a mole. The worst infection I've come across survived even this complicated ritual. I eventually discovered Adware Away which cleaned everything out quickly and easily after running it twice with a reboot in the middle. Those guys write bad English, but good software. Another alternative to consider is one of the products from InterMute, who recently purchased CWSShredder, which used to be the best tool in this area before the author was overwhelmed trying to keep up with new version. You can download the now updated CWSShredder, and Intermute's Spy Subtract software is reportely a good one.
msconfig is a very useful utility from Microsoft for seeing what your PC does when it's booting and to control that process. It ships with Windows XP. That executable also works perfectly fine under Windows 2000 once you obtain a copy. I have stashed one with the help file you can download.
tweakui (Windows XP version) from Microsoft adds a new control panel item that lets you adjust all sorts of things. The one thing I always do is use the Paranoia tab to turn off the automatic CD autorun and/or playing features of Windows.
TrendWare anti-virus: you can access an IE-plugin version of their software in the "Free Online Scan" at the easy to remember antivirus.com. I use this all the time to clear out problems from people who have let the software updates to their PC-based anti-virust software expire.
SMART hard disk monitoring: all modern hard drives actively monitor themselves and report how frequently errors are occuring internally. These usually show up far enough in advance of the actual drive failure that you can get your data off before the drive dies. I have been using HDD Health for this, but lately I have noted that for some of my hard drives it's entirely too chatty about small changes in the drive error counts really don't indicate a true failure; it's a bit chicken little. I am evaluating the less slick smartmontools right now because I know the core technology works accurately under Linux.

Handy applications in areas that have many bad ones

There are a few categories of PC applications that are commonly used where almost all of the software is awful, and that's no good when I need to download South Park episodes. Below are the programs versions I use that are free of spyware and nasty bugs.

ffdshow adds video codecs for things like DivX.

bittornado: a BitTorrent client that allows you to download single files in an archive without pulling down the whole thing. In addition, this doesn't have any of the problems with crashes taking out my network connection that the original BitTorrent client had for me.

emule or shareaza: peer-to-peer (P2P) clients that are functional replacements for spyware infested junk downloader programs that you should avoid like Kazaa, Limewire, and Morpheus.

Mozilla Firefox : excellent web browser that's free of many of the systematic security problems that plauge Internet Explorer. Two things keep this from being a perfect replacement for IE to me: it doesn't remember where I was in the middle of a long page when I use the back button, and many of the ActiveX controls I use at some regular sites I visit always crash under Firefox.

Mozilla Thunderbird: e-mail client that's far better for your system than Microsoft Outlook. One recent feature I really like that I can block all image downloading by default and only approve that on messages I want to see: makes checking e-mail a lot faster when people have sent me image-heavy garbage (often ads), keeps me from feeding web bugs, and I'm less vulnerable to future image processing security bugs like the recent GIF/JPEG decoding fiascos. Thunderbird is the natural successor for people who have used programs like Netscape Mail or Eudora in the past, and Outlook users who don't need to non-email functions of that program can get a more secure system by switching to this.