Preston Gralla, writing in NetworkWorld, has compiled the obligatory year-end/beginning list of freeware.  As it happens, I use about half the stuff on his list, so he saved me the trouble of writing one of my own. 

My only disagreement (and it isn’t, really) is Trillian Lite.  I love Trillian, but the lite version won’t handle Google Talk and others based on the Jabber protocol.  You have to buy the paid version.  Since I have literally dozens of correspondents on GTalk (and only a few on the “Big Three”) I use Pidgin (formerly GAIM).  It’s not as full-featured as Trillian, or as pretty, but it gets the job done for my purposes.

Preston writes:

As a frequent downloads reviewer for PC World, I look at lots of downloadable software every year — more apps than I care to count. As a result, each week, I encounter and test-drive the great, the not-so-great, and the feeble.

Every once in a while, a piece of software so clearly outclasses its peers that it deserves special commendation. For this article, I’ve assembled my 15 favorite downloads of 2007, selected from a wide range of categories–everything from antivirus and security tools to system tweakers, from media managers to system speedups.

Among them you’ll probably find some old favorites, but also plenty of unfamiliar apps that you’ll grow to love.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/122607-the-15-