Dreamweaver is probably the standard web building program, I use that along with Textpad (not notepad) for hand coding.
Photoshop and CorelDraw are good graphics programs. Photoshop is all about photo editing as the name implies and CorelDraw is good for making posters and a lot more, it's hard to describe. Adobe Illustrator is good too for doing lineart. Check out -
http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/previous/expression3_downloadlinks.aspx It was just bought by Microsoft and while they 'improve' it they are giving it away so get it now!
Video editing look at Adobe Premier. Virtualdub is good and free for standard edits and filters converting etc..
Audio look at CoolEdit (now Adobe Audition and not as good as it was), Sound Forge, Audacity for editing. CoolEdit is brilliant. For recording look at Cubase SX, Logic Audio, Sonar, ProTools (thats the real industry standard).
Internet, I use Opera and FireFox for browsing, Outlook for email, Limewire for hearing new music, Bitlord for downloading entire films, and CDs in one go. WarFTP for a free FTP client. Oooh, also look at VNC for a remote desktop, I can use my home computer to do anything from anywhere in the world and use IIS to make a web server just hosting a directory so I can access the files. There is a new program that does both and is free but I forget its name. I can find it if anyone wants too know, its faster than VNC too.
Norton Ghost is also a great program for backing up your computer. The newer version.. I have 2004 I think, can back up NTFS too. It will take your whole hard disk and turn it into one big file. You can then restore your entire computer, programs, documents and all in one swift move at any time. Far, far better than windows 'restore' or 'rollback' or whatever they like to call it which just saves windows' own settings.
CPUIdle is a cheap app that cools your CPU by turning it off for every cycle it isn't used, it has no effect on performance and on average drops the temp by 5-10c.
That should cost you a pretty penny! But they are the top dogs.
, the price is quite good and it will import and export in industry standard file structures including those formats supported by Microsoft. I would further suggest looking at Mozilla Thunderbird for managing your email and Mozilla Firefox for browsing as in my opinion both products fit together quite well and Firefox is a safer offering to use than Microsoft IE. You might find that some of the Firefox extentions allow you a fair bit of control over how the browser functions and in my view that is good.
Its better than good.
