OFFICE SOFTWARE

• Microsoft Office patches and addons
  
• The Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack (offered by Microsoft) provides the ability to open, read, edit and save Word/Excel 2007 files with Word/Excel 2000 and 2003.
• Microsoft offers several free viewers:
• Microsoft Word Viewer
• Microsoft Excel Viewer
• Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer
• Other applications
• Network Notepad is a freeware application for drawing network diagrams; it can also be used to create flowcharts.
  

SECURITY SOFTWARE

• Antivirus tools
• Microsoft Security Essentials for Windows XP / Vista / 7
• Antispyware tools
• Lavasoft AdAware
  
• Spybot Search & Destroy

UTILITIES

• Command line tools
• FTPDMIN is a very simple FTP server (written by Matthias Wandel) designed to be run temporarily on a Windows system.  Very handy for quickly transferring data between systems, but no login controls or other security provided.
• A number of Linux tools have been ported for use with the Windows CLI (Command Line Interface) by GnuWin:
  
• GSAR (Global Search And Replace), a program that can be used to search for and replace strings in text files (or standard input, if you are doing command line redirection).
• TAR (Tape ARchive), a program used to create "tarball" archive files and extract files from tarball archives.
• File compression/decompression tools
• ZIP and UNZIP (from Info-Zip) are open source command line tools for creating, updating and unpacking ZIP files.
• 7-Zip is a free GUI tool for dealing with ZIP files; a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version are offered.
• Linux connectivity tools
• Ext2Read is a GUI tool that allows browsing a Linux partition from a Windows system (useful when setting up a dual boot Windows/Linux system)
• Low level tools
• SysInternals tools are now owned by Microsoft, but a pre-Microsoft set is still available in the form another user originally downloaded them and as he found them on BitTorrent
• PDF tools
• BullZIP PDF printer, a freeware print driver that creates a virtual printer that can be used to create PDF files from any Windows application that can print

IM tools

• Skype, an IM service and client application
• Pidgin, an open source IM chat tool that works with multiple IM service providers
• Plugin to use Pidgin with Skype IM
• Plugin to use Pidgin with Facebook IM