Video: VLC

Play DVDs and almost all video file formats without the need for installing video codecs.
VLC will take care of most of your video viewing needs with minimal setup required.

Instant Messaging: Pidgin

Easily use all of your Instant Messaging accounts in one console with Pidgin.
Talk to friends on AIM, Google Talk, MSN, Yahoo IM, and more.

Web Browser: Firefox and Chrome

Firefox usually offers a bit more security than Internet Explorer, and Chrome provides much more speed.
Firefox also allows great add-ins to make browsing the internet better.

Anti-Virus: AVG Free, Avira, Microsoft Security Essentials

Basic Anti-Virus protection for your PC.

Archive/Compression: 7zip

I really love this app, because all you have to do is right-click and extract  and zipped file in 2 clicks.  You can create zipped files just as easy.  It even extracts msi files and many zipped file types.

Audio Player: foobar2000

An advanced/high-quality audio player that can be customized as much or as little as you want.

Image Viewer: IrfanView

View basically every type of image file in existence with relative ease. Extensive options make the program highly-configurable.

Office & Word Processing: Google Docs (or Open Office)

Instead of buying and installing software for word processing, spreadsheets and/or slide show presentations, you can just use the web-based Google Docs. Because Google Docs is web-based, you don’t have to worry about losing the files that you’ve created – they’re automatically backed-up for you!

If you’d prefer not to use a web-based application you can check out Open Office instead.

The solution to this is called Heuristics.  Heuristics is the ability of the program to detect what looks and acts like a virus without knowing for certain that it is a virus.  This means the program can detect and stop a virus that has just been created today!

Antivirus companies quality and percentage of detection varies from year to year.  The top dog this year may be behind the curve next year, due to the constant changing dynamic of viruses.  I have tested multiple of the leading Antivirus programs, and I can say that currently I would buy Eset Nod 32 Antivirus.  This is for 3 main reasons…
1 – Advanced Heuristics on this programs seems to be more advanced than any other that I have tested.
2- Speed – Eset is smart enough to back off it’s scanner, when it sees you are trying to use a whole lot of memory or CPU.  This means that the normal issue of your Antivirus making your computer slow is almost not an issue.  The full computer scanner also run very fast.
3- Detection Rate – This program in my tests (and many third-party tests) has proven to detect things that many others miss.

What if you do not want to pay money for Antivirus or do not need the most advanced Antivirus?
Nowadays many companies offer free versions of their Antivirus programs.  These programs usually do not have all the features of the full program, but they do provide enough protection to protect your computer from most threats.

Top Free Antivirus Applications (no particular order)
1 – Avast Free Antivirus
2 – Avira AntiVir Personal
3- Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition
4- AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition
5- Microsoft Security Essentials

One such way is to locate your “My Computer” icon. It will be located on your start menu and/or desktop.  Right-click on My Computer, and select properties.

The system properties (pictured below) will appear, and it shows you the operating system, version, and service pack installed. It also shows you what processor you have and how much RAM is installed in your computer. 

If you click on the Computer Name tab, then it will show the full computer name and the workgroup or domain to which you belong.

Now let’s find out some information about your hard drive(s) and CD/DVD drive(s). Just click on My Computer in the start menu or double click the desktop icon. If you hover your mouse on the hard drive and do not move it for a second, then it will display the amount of free space and the total size of that drive. The DVD drive just shows what is currently in the drive…if nothing was in the drive, then it would show that it is a DVD-RAM drive.

You can also right-click on the drive and click on properties to get a bit more information about the drive.

It appears as though there are 3 hard drives in this computer, but that is not true. For more advanced information about the hard drives we will have to look at the disk management console. Click the start button and then Run.

The following box opens. Type “diskmgmt.msc” without the quotes and hit enter or click okay.

The disk management console will open, and display information about hard drives and CD/DVD drives. You can see below that this computer only has one physical hard drive (Disk 0), but it is broken up into partitions (The operating system treats them as if they are separate drives). If there was another hard drive it would be Disk 1. We see that the main drive is 465GB, it has 3 partitions, and the free space of each partition. There is also only one CD-ROM drive (which has DVD marked right below it), if there was another it would be called CD-ROM 1.

There are some other methods for gathering more advanced information. One is typing dxdiag in the run box (may not work for all computers). This shows system information and if you click on display and sound, then it will show information about your graphics card and sound card.

Another method is to click start, then Run, and type “cmd” in the run box. Then at the command prompt type “systeminfo”. This will bring up an entire list of information about your PC, such as computer name, operating system, memory, etc.

Device manager is another great tool for finding information about your computer. Once again click start, then Run, and type “devmgmt.msc” in the run box. This will give you advanced information about your PC, and by double-clicking an item you can view more information, such as drivers and other options.

Knowing where to find information about your computer can be important and useful. These tools can allow you to hop on most Windows machines (most of these tools work on most versions of windows), and find out the speed of the processor, the amount of memory, the version of the operating system, the size of the hard drive and much more.