Since you are here and if you have time, please have a look at some interesting links:
Try it, switch to FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) before you buy the next upgrade of your often far too expensive computer programmes. Most of them work on various platforms and many are available in a portable format to run from your USB-key, so you always have them on hand.
Need a MS compatible office package? Take OpenOffice, a complete set of tools for your texts, spreadsheets, presentations, data bases and simple graphics; included is a formatting assistant to help you create formulas for your scientific texts. You need sometimes to create files in html format? KompoZer makes it easy to get what you are looking for: markup highlighting or wysiwyg, all in one, styled with css. NotePad++ is able to visualise many languages, including html, and is a powerful replacement for the antic MS Notepad (do you remember any change since you first saw it?)
Sure you heard about Firefox and the fox's friend for your emails, Thunderbird. There are lots of useful add-ons, or plug-ins, for both of them to be customised 'sur mesure'. Back up your mails and bookmarks with MozBackup. Have a chat with friends using Pidgin, it connects you with everybody in one single interface. And there is a Free Download Manager too, to get all this stuff easily down from the web and into your hard drive.
If a Word-like text editor is not sufficiently flexible for your elaborated page layout work, take a look at Scribus. Use Inkscape to create your vector graphics and the GIMP to work the bitmap images. All three allow you to work with multiple layers.
Audacity edits your multy-track sound creations and XnView, even if not open source, shows you your pictures and helps you improving them. If you get a strange audio or video file and MS Media Player is stuck, open it in VLC Media Player.
Zip and unzip with 7zip, hide your sensitive stuff with TrueCrypt (folders or entire disks) and KeePass keeps your passwords safe.
Did you ever use a file browser with dual display and then go back to MS Windows Explorer? Quit the stone age and download FreeCommander.
Another good idea for those who never dared: before you go to bed, start downloading a liveCD of one of the leading Linux distributions (Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuse etc.) and see how easy Linux has become, all without any risk of disturbing your installed operating system. There are many more than our prefered ones mentioned here.
LiveCDs are also a great tool to access and save your data from a sick computer, particularly if all your personal files are on the same partition as your operating system (as still the case in MS Windows' default setup) and are in big danger of being lost for ever in case of a re-install.
Are marketing master Bill and some other big-ones really the only ones providing good software? Others provide similar or more for less, try it out and let your friends know about. And if you really like and use one or some or all of these great tools, think about their developers who continuously improve these programmes for us and make a donation. Thanks.