Do you want the ability to run Microsoft Office documents at home for free? OpenOffice lets you open and save to Microsoft formats, and offers similar features and interfaces to programs found in Microsoft Office.

OpenOffice is a full-featured office suite including:

• Writer - word processor and web page editor
• Calc - spreadsheet package
• Impress - Presentation software
• Draw - Design program
• Base - Database
• Math - Mathematical equation writer

Features in this version include PDF and Flash export at the click of button, a macro recorder for increased productivity and mail merge. You can read and write documents in a wide range of formats including Microsoft Office.

Audacity lets you edit your sounds using Cut, Copy and Paste and mix multiple tracks together. Save your files in a number of formats, including WAV, Ogg Vorbis and AIFF. MP3 support is available using the external LAME MP3 encoder, which can be installed after installing Audacity. It also has advanced features such as the amplitude envelope editor, a customisable spectrogram mode and a frequency analysis window for audio analysis applications. Built-in effects include Bass Boost, Wahwah, and Noise Removal. This full-featured program is fast and stable, and suitable for the budding musician. Use Audacity to record your own podcasts, mix music, or just be creative!

Blender can make advanced 3D graphics allowing you to make models and animations. If you are really good you can even make things as stunning as the latest Hollywood movies! It is the only 3D creation program which allows the artist to model, texture, animate, render, and export the finished product in a package less than 10 MB (plus it's free!). Blender natively exports to a multitude of 3D formats such as VRML, Cal3d, AC3D allowing you to work with other high quality 3D programs.

Clamwin is a powerful anti-virus program with features such as high detection rates for viruses and spyware, scanning scheduler, automatic downloads of regularly updated virus Database, and much more.

Note: Currently ClamWin does not include an on-access real-time scanner. You need to manually scan a file in order to detect a virus or spyware. This means that it will not protect you from, for example, viruses you receive in compressed folders unless you make sure to scan the files inside before opening them. For the best security, you need to keep informed and be wary of installing programs from unknown sources

Dia is diagram software, it allows you to draws all sorts of technical drawings including flowcharts and circuit diagrams. Technical diagrams are needed when doing work in subjects such as electronics and resistant materials. You may also have need to use a flow chart to show how you plan out how to solve a problem. For example what would you do to bake a cake? Dia can help you solve all these problems on a computer where you can correct mistakes and save you work and put it into other pieces of work to look really professional.

FileZilla is a fast and reliable FTP client and server with lots of useful features and an intuitive interface. Features include upload/download resume, site manager, keep-alive system, SSL and SFTP support, and a flexible file queuing system.

The most secure web browser available to date, Mozilla FireFox loads pages blazingly fast and has more built-in features than Internet Explorer. Firefox continues to lead the way in online security, and now includes active protection from online scams to keep you safer. Choose from over a thousand useful add-ons that enhance Firefox. It’s easy to personalize Firefox to make it your own.

FreeMind is a mind mapping program which lets you collect your ideas in an easy to understand way with text, colours and pictures. A mind map is a drawing used to show words, ideas, tasks or other things. Everything is written around a word or idea in the middle. This word or idea is the main topic of the mind map, and the things around it are linked to the main idea. It is used to store and order ideas, and is very useful for study, ordering your things, solving problems, planning, and making choices. FreeMind lets you do all this on your computer and is really good for planning essays or projects.

GanttProject is a useful tool to help you plan your school projects like a professional. A gantt chart is a quick and easy way to plan large projects by splitting them into lots of little tasks and seeing how all the tasks work with each other. You can give some time to each little task and keep track of how you are doing until you complete the entire project. GanttProject allows you to plan your projects to the smallest detail all on a computer so you can save, change and print everything you do. You can even work with commercial software like Microsoft Project as GanttProject can open files made with it and GanttProject has many of the features that Microsoft Project does.

The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is suitable for those wanting to edit digital photographs, design and export graphics for the web, convert images from one file format to another, or even produce complex high-resolution graphics for print. The GIMP features a number of paint and photo editing tools found in other professional image editors, it has support for loading and saving in formats compatible with Adobe Photoshop and Paintshop Pro amongst others, and much much more! If you install the GIMP Animation Package, you can then use GIMP to create animated GIF images.

HealthMonitor is a powerful and feature filled monitoring tool for your Windows computer. It works as a Windows Service, monitoring system performances/thresholds (CPU load average, free memory, disk space, Event Viewer...) and handling specific checks (Check HTTP, windows services, custom script). It can log results into a database or send a notification by E-Mail, SMS, or PopUp. Install HealthMonitor if you would like to keep a close watch on the functioning of your Windows computer, and be notified if anything goes wrong.

Infra Recorder lets burn to blank and rewritable disks. Ever wanted to make your own CDs and DVDs? You can collect all your holiday pictures, burn a music cd for a friend, put together a movie file to watch on your DVD player, or just back up some school work. Infra Recorder lets you do all of this through an easy to use interface and with out the need to pay for those expensive CD burning programs. Enjoy!

Inkscape is an easy to use vector graphics editor. Because Inkscape uses "vector" rather than "raster" graphics editing (which is mostly used by the GIMP), you can always go back later to reposition items and change font sizes, and you won't end up with blocky graphics when you enlarge your images. This makes Inkscape perfect for making logos, web 2.0 style images and create diagrams for reports and projects.

With capabilities similar to Illustrator, Fireworks, Freehand, CorelDraw, and Xara X; Inkscape offers professional tools and features. Inkscape uses Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and can save to multiple vector-based formats, this means you can work on things in Inkscape and then transfer them to other programs at school. The program offers lots of cool tools, including layers, in-built shapes and complicated shading effects. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG, you you can include your images in what ever program you need.

Jahshaka is a powerful video editing program that lets you make home movies, edit them and add special effects. Have you ever wanted to make a presentation for a school project that looks professional and brings together videos? Have you ever wanted to edit videos like a professional and add special effects like on T.V? Jahshaka gives you the chance to do all these things from the comfort of your own home. This program is quite an advanced tool and you may need a little help to get started, try this guide first of all. Jahshaka may also run a little slow as it requires quite a powerful computer to get the best out of it.

Notepad2 is intended to be a replacement for the Notepad program that is included as part of Windows. Like Notepad, Notepad2 is small, fast, and has few frills. It does, however, add some functionality such as colour syntax highlighting that many people will find useful, especially those that have to edit the odd HTML page or script. You can select the level of zoom and select the editing font. Notepad2 supports Unicode, UTF-8, Unix and Mac text files.

Nvu (pronounced en-view) is the open source world's answer to Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Microsoft Front Page. It is a fully featured What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) web page editor, enabling you to create professional web pages without having to devote months to learning HTML. Nvu includes an integrated FTP site manager to upload your websites to your webspace, a style sheet editor, tabbed workspaces, and all the features you've come to expect from a fully-featured web page editor. It also features integrated support for HTML code validation, to help you make your HTML as clean and light-weight as possible. Because Nvu is built on top of the award-winning Gecko rendering engine that also powers the Firefox web browser, every moment is a live preview: what you see is truly what you get.

Use PDFCreator to generate PDF documents directly from any Windows program. PDF (Portable Document Format) files are the standard documents used in electronic publishing, because the author can be sure that the document will look the same on all computers. PDFs are becoming even more important in schools with courses such as DiDA only allowing you to hand in work in PDF format. PDFs can also be generated with commercial packages, but PDFCreator is by far the easiest and cheapest option (free). Once installed, simply select 'Print' from the File menu of your word processor or drawing program, and select 'PDFCreator Printer' from the list of printers. Click 'Save' and enter a name for your PDF output file. That's it!

Optionally, you may also enter information to identify the document, such as Title, Creation Date and Author. The Options dialogue lets you control the process in more detail. You can set the resolution and compression levels for the various file types, and control how fonts are included. Use the security feature to protect your document with a password. JPEG, PNG, Postscript (PS) and Encapsulated Postscript (EPS) output formats are also supported.

For the advanced user, PDFCreator is highly customizable, and offers a wide variety of options regarding document encoding, compression levels, and automated document conversion.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way of finding out what is new on websites without having to check them yourself. Software that collects data from RSS sites (such as the BBC) are called RSS readers or "aggregators." RSSOwl is one of these. RSSOwl lets you gather, organize, update, and store information from any RSS capable site, easy to use interface, save selected information in various formats for offline viewing and sharing, and much more.

Scribus is a professional desktop publishing application with a selection of "press-ready" templates. Scribus includes powerful industry tools for making professional documents. Scribus supports thousands of languages including right to left text such as Arabic and Hebrew. Scribus supports professional formats so you can open documents from other programs and save to programs like Word and Publisher. Examples of Scribus uses include writing small newspapers, brochures, newsletters, posters and even books.

Thunderbird is a modern email client with features such as intelligent spam filters to stop you getting junk mail, a built-in spell checker, a range of themes and customisable layout. Thunderbird provides IMAP/POP support so you can link it with hotmail, gmail, yahoo and many others. It has HTML e-mail composing, quick searchs for old messages, an address book, autoaddress completion, import tools, and the ability to manage multiple e-mail and newsgroup accounts at the same time. You can add a wide variety of extensions to Thunderbird to add additional features or tweak its behaviour to suit your own preferences.

As with Mozilla Firefox, security is a central theme. Thunderbird provides business and government level security features such as S/MIME, digital signing, message encryption, support for certificates and security devices. The intelligent Thunderbird spam filter analyzes your e-mails to identify those that are most likely to be junk. These can be automatically deleted or diverted to a separate folder. The spam filter is adaptive and also learns from your address book and usage to improve its accuracy.

TightVNC is a remote control software that lets you see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer. Ideal for remote administration, remote customer support, education, and for many other purposes, and because it works across different operating systems you can use almost any computer, from any computer. The TightVNC package includes a server (which allows users on other computers connect to yours) and a client (for you to log in to others' computers)