I earn my bread and butter by working as a computer technician and I have to on daily basis install Windows on my client's computers. Windows in it's default installation lacks many essential softwares for day-to-day computing tasks. I used to have a DVD containing all the essential softwares and recently that DVD got broken by an accident. Burning a new DVD became necessary and I went on the hunt for the set of softwares which are essential after a fresh Windows install. My criteria was simple. Choose the softwares which are open source and only include closed source softwares when there is no viable open source alternative available.
