First and foremost let us warn you about the potential for fraud, harrassment, and invasion of your privacy (remember, the anti-American subversives (Democrats and Liberals) have been in power for a long time)!

• Do NOT respond in any way to any Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), which is commonly known as, "spam." Don't even read it! The problem is...
  
  1. the offer is probably not legitimate, may be an illegal "get-rich-quick" scheme, and may even be a scam
  2. if you respond, even to an "unsubscribe" service that they offer, it verifies that your email address is valid: it can now be sold for a higher price
  3. it encourages spammers to spam others
  4. due to the extra resources needed to handle so much worthless, unwanted traffic, an estimated 10% of your Internet bill is a result of spam

• Do NOT forward virus alerts and other "stories" to others, especially if it encourages you to do so. There is a wealth of enjoyable information about myths, virus hoaxes, privacy invasion, and scams at:
  
  1. http://www.snopes.com
  2. http://urbanlegends.about.com
  3. Hoaxbusters.org
  4. http://www.vmyths.com/
  5. Gibson Research
     http://www.grc.com
     
  6. Scambusters.org
  7. PrivacyFoundation
  8. Private Citizen, Inc.
     http://www.privatecitizen.com (Stop Junk Calls, Junk Mail, Telemarketing)
     

• Do NOT automatically send to other people the jokes, stories, and newsletters that have been sent to you. Send them only to those who want to get them from you. Otherwise you're an annoyance, and in a sense, a spammer! You may also be violating the author's copyright.

• In my opinion, do NOT buy a name-brand computer, nor go to any of the national chain computer or electronic stores to buy your computer. Go to a local, reputable computer shop. You'll get the same, if not better components, there will be knowledgeable, personalized service, and you're supporting the local economy. You're almost always guaranteed authentic, non-branded, fully-functional software products (such as Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office).

  The software installed by major manufacturers is often branded with their own name, and sometimes it's even been crippled in some way. Quite often you're also not given the original installation CDs: if your computer crashes and/or the software must be reinstalled, you may have to send your computer back to the factory! The local shop sells you the authentic CDs in accordance with standard licensing agreements, and you get to keep them.

  Consider building your own computer. I bought my first modern, Pentium PC from a local shop; as I learned more about computers over the years, I upgraded that one and then built 3 more for the rest of the family.

  If you wish to order online, I'd suggest Tiger Direct
  

And now for the good stuff...

Here are some of my favorite, usually free, helpful programs and sites (your mileage may vary):

• The best web browser: Mozilla Firefox

• For email, Outlook Express is good, but I use Mozilla Thunderbird

• The best free office suite (word processer, spreadsheet, presentation software, etc.): OpenOffice.org
  (highly compatible with Microsoft Office)

• The best free Bible software: e-Sword
  (but please support them with a donation!)

• The best free Image viewer/converter/manipulator: IrfanView
  (no need to be using your web browser, or any other bloated program just to view picture files)

• Good free Text editors or Windoze Notepad replacements are EditPad, MetaPad, and Win32Pad
  (but not necessarily in that order)

• The best free "Zip" (archiver or file compression) program: IZArc
  (no need to bother with something like WinZip)

• The best commercial (NOT free) "Zip" (archiver or file compression) program: PowerArchiver

• The best free FTP utility: FileZilla

• The best free FTP utility as a Mozilla Firefox plug-in: FireFTP

• For the best customizable start page or "portal" consider myYahoo! or myExcite

• Favorite search engine: Yahoo

• The best free web-based email: so MANY to choose from, but the real winner is Yahoo!

• Used to be very poor, and not recommended, but since they've come a long way in recent years I can now suggest Hotmail and AOL as good free web-based email providers.

• Another good free web-based email service, but this one has many domains to choose from: mail.com

• The de-facto standard email public-key encryption plug-in: Pretty Good Privacy

• Free and much easier public-key encryption implementation for Mozilla Thunderbird email program: EnigMail

• File Encryption utilities: one of the best and most simple programs is AxCrypt. It uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), originally published as Rijndael.

  Although AES is fast and robust, Blowfish and Twofish are fast, state-of-the-art, and probably the world's most powerful algorithms; they were invented and entered into the public domain by Bruce Schneier

  One of the best free implementations I've ever seen for a file encryption utility using Blowfish and Twofish (and many others) is "Blowfish Advanced CS" by Markus Hahn, but it doesn't seem to be under further development. Locations where it can be found is http://bfacs.sourceforge.net and http://www.lassekolb.info/bfacs.htm

• The best free virtual drive, disk encryption software is TrueCrypt (uses Twofish, AES, and other encryption techniques).