Anytime I set up a new web server or get a new personal computer, I install all of my favorite free software programs.

7-Zip: good for zipping and un-zipping files, splitting large files

EditPad Lite: a great text editor, can open many files at a time, global search and replaces that can include multiple lines in the search or replace (many editors can't do that)

FileZilla: fantastic FTP program -- I love being able to export a list of files in the queue that can be reloaded and run at any time.

PrimoPDF: creates PDFs from just about anything

SC DiskInfo: this handy little program tells about the disk space usage on your hard drives. If a drive is filling up, this tells you where to look first for clean up.

Visual Web Developer Express: I do all of the website development in Visual Studio, but this is a handy little program to install on live web servers just in case something needs tweaking immediately.

Xenu's Link Sleuth: finds broken links in your website. I always run in before declaring a website has gone live.

My latest find: Agent Ransack. a great file searching utility. It was driving me crazy how the Windows Explorer just could not find text inside of files. It is extremely limited in the types of files that it would search. As a developer, I need it to search .vb, .aspx, .asmx, .config files. I also absolutely did NOT want a program that would constantly be running in the background checking my emails, documents, chat histories, etc. I had a simple need (I thought). I wanted to be able to say "search this directory for this text string". Agent Ransack does just that. I open it when I need and I close it when I'm done. It doesn't go poking around in files that is none of its business. It provides a nice listing of files that contain the string I was searching for, and it will also display the whole line containing the string. It can handle regular expressions as well.