It’s only that, as a geek, I have XP Pro in my family members’ computers so that I can be the administrator on them. Since I keep their computers running, restricting what regular users who are not very computer-savvy can do, saves them grievance and my time. Then again, the DSL ISP provided Norton at first and McAfee later, all for free.

WRT OpenOffice, I used it our computers when trying to bypass Office. However, my daughter was having problems with her college professors opening the Office files generated by it, which could lose important details from charts and other minor incompatibilities. In the end, I had to give in and buy Office for her, at student prices though, after she labeled OpenOffice “your bootlegged Office”.

Cheers.

@Bill,
OpenOffice is slow to load because it requires Java, which is notoriously slow compared to native MS windows code (i.e. MS office). But remember, it’s a trade off. If you’re a windows user and have access to MS Office, you’re probably better off with that. However, if you just want a word processor, spreadsheet app, etc and don’t want to shell out hundreds of dollars for MS Office, then OpenOffice is a wonderful thing!

I want to like OpenOffice, but it is very slow to load. Plus, some of its functions just don’t make any sense to me (but in all fairness, I am a longtime Office user). I do like that it preserves hyperlinks when exporting to PDF. Nothing else that is free has this functionality (that I’ve found).

AVG is very good. Might want to take a look at Comodo: Free security products like anti-virus and firewalls. It’s pretty cool.

I do like the portable apps, too, like Revo Uninstaller. It works great from a flash drive and removes nearly any and all traces of software you no longer want. CCCleaner is great too.

Media Monkey is a great music manager too. Much better, IMHO, than iTunes.

Avast is a little better, but, like AVG, it cannot be hidden as a service away from a typical user’s tricky hands.

After evaluating these as well as three other anti-virus programs, I settled for Norton Anti-Virus. It performed best among them, taking up very little CPU and memory usage. Besides, it was easy to set up one computer and have the others use the same settings without the users noticing.

Honestly, when it comes to securing one’s computer, I think that $40/year for Norton Anti-Virus is a reasonable price to pay. It’s just a matter of avoiding those souped up versions which bring very little to table and inflate the costs, such as firewall, spyware, etc, all which come with Windows standard.

BTW, you could’ve mentioned Google Pack, a collection of free software that includes some of those you’ve mentioned, but are kept up to date by Google Updater.

HTH