I was just looking throught the forums at Neowin and found a great list of freeware. You should go and sign up over there as well as they have a lot of great content on that site as well as a lot of information in the forums. so if you are looking to burn some time you can really do a lot of reading in the forums on that site.
I have only included the freeware here that I have used in the past and really like:
Anti-Virus:
AVG – http://free.grisoft.com/
Anti Spyware:
Ad-aware – http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/
CWShredder – http://www.intermute.com/spysubtract/cwshr…r_download.html
Hijackthis – http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/downloads.html
Microsoft AntiSpyware – http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx
SpyBot Search & Destroy – http://spybot.safer-networking.de/
Audio Players:
Winamp – http://www.winamp.com/
Desktop Enhancements:
Konfabulator – http://www.konfabulator.com/info
File Managers:
2xExplorer – http://netez.com/2xExplorer/
A43 – http://www.shawneelink.net/~bgmiller/
ExplorerXP – http://www.explorerxp.com/
Firewalls:
Zonealarm Basic firewall – http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/company/products/znalm/freeDownload.jsp
FTP Clients:
Filezilla – http://sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla
SmartFTP – http://www.smartftp.com/
FTP Servers:
FileZilla – http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/
HTML Editors:
1st page 2000 – http://www.evrsoft.com/download.shtml
AceHTML – http://freeware.acehtml.com/download.html
Aracnophilia – http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/
HTML-Kit – http://www.chami.com/html-kit/
NVU – http://www.nvu.com/index.html
Image viewers:
Irfanview – http://www.irfanview.com/
Picasa – http://www.picasa.com/content/download.php
Internet Explorer Front-Ends:
Maxthon – http://www.maxthon.com/
Mail programs:
Thunderbird – http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/
Network Tools:
Ethereal Protocol Analyzer – http://www.ethereal.com/
NMap – http://www.insecure.org/nmap/
PDF Utilities:
Foxit PDF Reader – http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.phpPDF 995 – http://www.pdf995.com/
Photo manipulation and image design:
Paint .NET – http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/
Pop-up Blockers:
Google Toolbar – http://www.google.com/
RSS Readers:
SharpReader – http://www.sharpreader.net/
RssBandit – http://www.rssbandit.org/
Feedreader – http://www.feedreader.com/
System Information and monitoring:
WCPUID – http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002374/src/download.html
There are a bunch more on the Windows Ultimate Boot CD as well as the Dos Boot CD
Web browsers:
Firefox – http://www.getfirefox.com/
Web servers:
Apache – http://httpd.apache.org/
Xitami – http://www.xitami.com/
Network Tools:
TCP Optimizer –http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php
