Naw, if you need to do some programming, go for Visual Studio 6 Enteprise edition, its great for database work. If you cant afford VS6 Enteprise, go for professional, its fairly cheap. And for images, use PSP7. Its expensive, but it does an awesome job. Hmm... heres what else:-WinAmp-Norton AntiVirus 2002-Windows 2000 (its a great OS, most stable Win32)-IE 5.5- http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com (If you dont know, you NEED to go there)-Windows Media Player 8 (Videos, RealOne bites)-WinZip and WinRAR (Yes, because WinZip really sucks with RARs and CABs, and WinRAR is really bad with ZIPs and TAR files)-ZoneAlarm (Pro or Free)(If you got broadband, use this!)-Microsoft Office 2002 (AKA XP, How do you guys forget such an important piece of software?)-AdAware (kills bad bad spyware)-NO FILESHARING UTILITIES! (these things are like the black plauge security and virus wise)-Norton Ghost (If you need to make backups)Get a large capacity storage device, like CDRW or peerless. I love my peerless drive, its saved my stupid file erasing paranoid ass more than once.*** Anti-Software Pirating / Warez Statement ***I personally hate warez, its a good way for companies to lose business, and if you get caught with it, you can be prosecuted. Its not worth the 10k fine PER INSTANCE (so, if you have 2 warez programs, you get slapped with up to 20K in fines). Also, it robs developers (like me) of hard earned money. Unless you write software, or websites, you can't honestly say that developers didn't earn and deserve the money for the business that was stolen. Copying HTML code from a site without the authors permission is STEALING! And is just as bad as software pirating.So, kids, just dont do warez, and keep Hadaken happy!