Open your Windows
For some reason or another people may be in the uncomfortable position to have no choice. But - bricked up in proprietary crap or not - at least open your Windows! When I'm confronted with the unholy task to tailor a "usable" workspace on a XP machine I quickly visit some webpages and get the following free stuff:
web, communication & multimedia
- start IE once just to download Firefox :D
- Winamp was finally kicked by Songbird
- mail communication is perfectly handled with Thunderbird
- chat communication can be done with Psi
- VLC for videos of course! - what else?!
- the only free burning application I found was infra-recorder, good enough to get what I need
graphics & design
...just the well known free suite
accessoires
- 7zip takes care of XPs bad *.zip handling and gives you support for *.7z, rar, ...
- openoffice for the necessary evil things
- winscp is perfect for uploading files via ssh or ftp
- freemind is a nice tool to keep track of a project or to make notes
- geany is one of about a million free software text editors that will do the job for your HTML/CSS editing
- ...
of course there are lots of other free software tools, but that list represents a very high quality set of tools that mostly is equally available in the GNU/linux world. What remains are all the drivers and little nasty tools you might have to install along with XP, but apart from that you can set up your open Window pretty easy.
Now - uninstall all the remaining crap and I'll call you a real man! ...before you finally switch to a free operating system, anyway ;)
