Recommended software and hardware. Free software is in red. 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) Extract compressed files – 7-Zip Audio 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 (alternative: Audacity) Capture – Replay Music Suites Microsoft 365 Family Word processing – Word Spreadsheets – Excel Presentations – PowerPoint Email – Outlook Adobe Creative Cloud Graphics – Photoshop Desktop publishing – InDesign Video production – Premiere Pro Vector graphics – Illustrator PDFs – Acrobat Productivity Email – HEY Team messaging – Slack Video calls – Zoom Text editor – Notepad++ File hosting – Google Drive Clipboard manager – Ditto Protocols FTP – FileZilla SSH – PuTTY IRC – mIRC (alternative: screen & irssi with PuTTY [screenshot]) NNTP – Agent Disk drives Mount – Virtual CloneDrive Burn – ImgBurn Back up – Syncovery Recover lost data – R-Studio Miscellaneous VPN – NordVPN with Chrome extension Facial enhancement – PortraitPro Website crawler – Screaming Frog Video editor – VirtualDub Firewall – ESET Smart Security File verification – QuickSFV Networking Domain names – Portfast Shared hosting – Mythic Beasts with Cloudflare VPS – Jump Networks Dedicated server – Bogons (enquire directly) Router – Netgear Nighthawk Broadband – Virgin Media Downloading Seedbox – Whatbox Music / Software – Redacted TV – BroadcasTheNet Films – PassThePopcorn Hardware Phone – OnePlus 9 with giffgaff Laptop – Lenovo Yoga Headphones – Bose 700 TV – Samsung Q67R Wireless speakers – AktiMate Mini+ B Hi-fi system – Grahams