These are some of my favorite programs for the PC.

 

Graphics

Photo and Image Editing

- Adobe Photoshop CS2 (Rules. Period) If you can afford the Creative Suite 2, I highly recommend it.

- Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 is a scaled down and more affordable version of Photoshop.

- The Gimp 2 is free and really good, but a bit hard to learn.

- CorelDRAW and Photopaint is good and inexpensive.

- Adobe Illustrator CS2 for drawing

 

 

Desktop Publishing

- Adobe InDesign CS (Excellent)

 

 

Web Authoring

- Dreamweaver 8 for web page creation, also look at Flash MX on the same site.

 

 

3d Animation

- Maya Complete or Unlimited

- Maya PLE (free but has water marks)

- 3d Studio Max

- Poser for people creation

 

Stop Motion

- Stop Motion Pro 4

 

 

Video Production

- Adobe Premiere Pro

- Adobe After Effects

 

 

Office Suites

- OpenOffice is free and works incredibly close to Microsoft Office

- Microsoft Office does work great, and you can get the student version for usually $150.00 or less.

 

 

Computer Utilities

- Partition Magic for partitioning drives that are already setup

- Nero 6 for burning CDs/DVDs

- Winzip for unzipping files

- Adobe Acrobat Reader for reading pdf files

 

 

Spyware & Security

- Norton Antivirus

- Spybot

 

 

Multimedia

- PowerDVD or WinDVD for playing DVD's

- DiVX for movies

- iTunes for mp3 playing

 

 

Internet

- Firefox

- AOL (Just because it is the standard. But Do Not install the Wild Tangent stuff)

 

 

Farsi and Arabic

- DorNegar - free Farsi/English computer Dictionary

- Ectaco (Makes great dictionary software)