On a Unix machine, you can use this little ftp trick to have an idea of your throughput :

ftp somehost
ftp> put “| dd if=/dev/zero bs=100000 count=100″ /dev/null
200 PORT command successful.
150 ASCII data connection for /dev/null (192.168.0.1,32953).
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
226 Transfer complete.
local: | dd if=/dev/zero bs=100000 count=100 remote: /dev/null
10000000 bytes sent in 2.9 seconds (3388.52 Kbytes/s)

This will generate a stream of bytes from one host to another and give you the data rate at the end

Here is the list of the software I use on my personnal computer. All of them are free for personnal use :

Malware Protection

AVG Free Edition – Antivirus
Adaware – Spyware removal tool
Spybot – Spyware removal tool

Web

Firefox – Web browser
GTalk – Instant messaging
MSN Messenger – Instant Messaging
ICQ – Instant Messaging
PuTTY – Multi-protocole remote terminal

Productivity

OpenOffice – Office suite
PDF Creator – Creating PDF
Sunbird – Calendar

System

DIRMS Defrag Tools
PowerToys – Tweak UI
SysInternals – AutoRuns : displays what runs at startup
SysInternals – PageDefrag : defrag your pagefile at boot
SysInternals – ProcessExplorer : Task Manager on steroids

Misc

Java
7-Zip – Good free archiver (many archive types supported)
AutoHotKey – Macros for windows

Media

VLC – Media player
foobar2000 – Music player

Bored of fighting with MS-Word to have proper titles numbering ? Tired of messing around styles ? Want a more “meaning oriented formating” and less “aesthetic oriented formating” ? Would like to generate HTML, PDF, WindowsHelp, or anything from the same source file ?

Have a look at DocBook ! DocBook is a document standard which lets you do all of this, and much more …

And XMLMind XML Editor is a nice free (like beer not ideas) editor which lets you edit DocBook Documents in a WYSIWYG fashion.

Links :

DocBook : The Definitive Guide

XMLMind XML Editor

FreeBSD’s handbook (written in DocBook, and rendered as HTML)