Some of this software is aimed at those with needs most users don't have (such as ftp) but a number should be valuable to almost everybody such as: Zone Alarm and Adobe Acrobat Reader)

• Ubuntu - Linux based operating system. A great alternative for a desktop operating system. It still has room for improvement but a great operating system and with a bight future.
  
• Wordpress - Great bloging software. We use it for our Curious Cat Science and Engineering blog.
  
• Open Office - An excellent freeware, open source, office suite that is based on XML file formats. A truely amazing piece of software far beyond the capability we expected. It is capable of reading, and exporting, files for expensive office suites.
  
• Mozilla Firefox - An excellent web browser that is standards compliant and secure. The best browswer available anywhere, in our opinion.
  
• Adobe Acrobat Reader - Valuable freeware for any internet user (there are freeware alternatives for viewing pdf files and those are becoming more attractive in our opinion).
  
• Ad-Aware - "Designed to provide advanced protection from known data-mining, aggressive advertising, parasites, scumware, selected traditional trojans, dialers, malware, browser hijackers, and tracking components."
  
• Picasa - Digital photo management software, owned by Google.
  
• Xplanet - A very cool screen saver that can show the current "picture" of the globe on your desktop. Xplanet gathers various satelite images and puts them in the form of a globe on your desktop using your internet connection.
  
• Spybot - Search and Destroy - Freeware to locte and remove skyware, malware and other bad software from your computer.
  
• Zip Central - A very good compresion and "unzip" utility. There are several good "zip" programs but this is our favorite. It can also create Self-Extracting archives.
  
• Zone Alarm - An excellent software firewall. Anyone using the internet should have some form of firewall. There is no reason not to use this freeware; those that want more features can buy the pro version.
  
• Smart ftp - An excellent freeware File Transfer Protocol (ftp) program. There are several good ftp freeware options but this is our top choice. It has no ads.
  
• Opera - The Opera web browser is now freeware and free of banner ads.
  
• MySQL - An amazingly powerful freeware, open source, database. This is the most complex piece of software to use that we include, but for those with experience using databases can learn to use MySQL without too much trouble. GUIs are available as p
  
• Rasterbator - "A web service which creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into extremely cool looking posters up to 20 meters in size."