Recommended software comprising 1 operating system, 2 suites and 34 programs. Free software is in red. My personal favourites here are foobar2000 and µTorrent. Basics Operating system – Windows 10 Browser – Chrome with Adblock Plus Audio – foobar2000 [screenshot] Video – VLC media player Antivirus – ESET NOD32 BitTorrent – µTorrent (version 2.2.1) Create / extract archives – WinRAR Audio Make audio CDs – EZ CD Audio Converter Rip exact copies – Exact Audio Copy [guide] Copy CDs – Nero Micro Burn cue sheets – Burrrn Stream music – Spotify Stream music from your PC – Subsonic Transcode FLAC to MP3 – foobar2000 with LAME encoder Tag and rename – foobar2000 with MusicBrainz tagger Edit – Audition (lightweight alternative: Audacity) Capture – Replay Music Suites Office 365 Home: Word processing – Word Spreadsheets – Excel Presentations – PowerPoint Email – Outlook Adobe Creative Cloud: Graphics – Photoshop (lightweight alternative: Photoshop Micro) Vector graphics – Illustrator Desktop publishing – InDesign Website design – Dreamweaver Video production – Premiere Pro Create PDFs – Acrobat Productivity Team communication – Slack VoIP calls – Skype Text editor – Notepad++ Clipboard manager – Ditto File hosting – Dropbox File search – Everything Protocols FTP – FileZilla SSH – PuTTY IRC – mIRC (techie alternative: screen & irssi through PuTTY [screenshot]) NNTP – Agent Disk drives Mount – Virtual CloneDrive Burn – ImgBurn Back up – Syncovery Recover lost data – R-Studio Miscellaneous Facial enhancement – PortraitPro Watch live sport – SopCast with MyP2P Video editor – VirtualDub Firewall – ESET Smart Security Blogging – Windows Live Writer File verification – QuickSFV An addendum for non-software recommendations: Audio Headphones – Audio-Technica ATH-M50XMG Mobile phone – HTC One M8 with giffgaff Sound card – M-Audio Audiophile 2496 Computer speakers – Audioengine A2 Hi-fi system – Grahams Blank CDs for hi-fi system – Taiyo Yuden Networking Domain names – Portfast Shared hosting – Mythic Beasts VPS – Jump Networks Dedicated server – Bogons (enquire directly) Router – Netgear R7000 Broadband – Virgin Media Downloading Seedbox – Whatbox Music / Software – What.CD TV – BroadcasTheNet Films – PassThePopcorn