Software

All the software listed here is both free and high quality, it is all software I'd been quite willing to use myself. However those marked [*] are programs I particularly recommend (and I usually those that I actually use).

(Link) generally links to the programs main site, while clicking the name of some will link to more information I have written.

Internet Browser
[*] Firefox (Link) 
Opera (Link)
Chrome (Link)

Internet
[*] uTorrent (Link) - Torrent client
[*] Pidgin (Link) - Instant messaging
[*] ThunderBird (Link) - Email
[*] WinSCP (Link) - FTP/SFTP/SCP client
[*] PuTTY (Link) - Telnet/SSH client
DC++ (Link) - P2P
X-Chat (Link) - IRC

Security
[*] Avast (Link) - Anti-virus

Office
[*] Foxit Reader (Link) - Lightweight PDF viewer
Open Office (Link)

Text Editors
[*] Notepad++ (Link) - Text editor
Notepad2 (Link)
VIM (Link)
EMACS (Link)

Media
[*] MPlayer for Windows (SMPlayer) (Link) - Video player
[*] VLC (Link) - Video Player ("It plays everything!")
[*] Foobar 2000 (Link) - Music player
[*] GIMP (Link) - Image editor
Audacity (Link)
CCCP/MPC (Link) - Video player
Super (Link) - Video converting/encoding

Programming
[*] Strawberry Perl (Link) - Perl on Windows
ActivePerl (Link) - Perl on Windows

Other
[*] Anki (Link) - Memory aid
[*] 7-Zip (Link) - File archiving
[*] Cygwin (Link) - A Linux like environment for Windows
[*] Wireshark (Link) - Network protocol analyser
XAMPP (Link) - Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl
Real Temp (Link) -  Temperature monitoring for Intel CPUs
Core Temp (Link)  - Temperature monitoring for CPUs
FileHippo.com Update Checker (Link)

Useful Sites
Portable Apps. (Link) - Versions of software modified for use on an external drive
Giveaway of the Day (Link) - A free piece of software (that you'd normally have to pay for) every day