Welcome to Part 1 of my Back to School Series! I will be featuring the cream of the crop when it comes to essential apps for your return to school. Whether you are heading back to college or high school (or continuing studies, for that matter), you will find exactly what you need. Part 1 will take a look at the best apps for Windows, but don’t worry Mac fans; you will get your day in the sun in Part 2! Finally, I will end the series in Part 3 with a look at the web 2.0 apps that are out there for students. After this series, you will be ready to ace all of your exams; well, I won’t guarantee that, but these lists should help.

On to the Windows programs. Now, some of these are definitely not free; far from it in fact. But they are all extremely useful and they should increase your productivity. On the other hand, I do have some freebies that you have no excuse for not downloading. Anyhow, take a look at my essentials, and let me know if I missed anything in the comments!

Office Suites

• Microsoft Office 2007 - Still the undisputed king, Office has and does everything that you need for an office suite (it also does some things you won’t need). Whether it is word processing, spreadsheets, presentations or notes, Office 2007 has a program to handle it and handle it well. I cannot say enough about the ribbon menus and numerous other great features. It is honestly the best release since Office 97. While it may seem a bit pricey, the Home and Student version starts at only $150 (you can find it at a discount if you look around).
• Open Office - If you need to edit documents, including Microsoft Word documents, and you can’t scrounge up the $150, then this is the program for you. It is open source and free. In fact, it is the model for open source. And it is a fantastic program to boot. I would say it is on par with Office 2003, which is impressive.

Communication

• Pidgin - This is my favorite out of all of the open source chat clients. Besides having a really nifty name, it is an incredible multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once (AIM, ICQ, SIMPLE, Bonjour, IRC, Sametime, Gadu-Gadu, MSN, XMPP, Google Talk, QQ, Yahoo!, Groupwise, SILC. Zephyr… that is a lot). It also has great features and customization options.
• Skype - When you are cold and alone and sad on a Tuesday night and you need someone to talk to, but your stupid Boost cellphone is out of credit, what are you going to do? Skype! Make free phone calls to anywhere for free. You just need a microphone and a net connection and you will be ready to chat with your old buddies… or maybe your mommy…

Backup/Protection

• Acronis True Image - This program will set you back $50, but is well worth the money. It has an intuitive interface and excellent features. This program will save your life when your laptop’s hard drive fails on you. It will restore seamlessly from your most recent backup and can do it fairly speedily. Another excellent feature is its ability to backup to a network drive if you are on a network.
• AntiVir - I don’t think that enough people use this anti-virus program. It has been my favorite for a while now. The company is European, so perhaps that is why it is not as well known here in the States, but ever since my boss in the IT department suggested it to me while I was at school in Switzerland, I have been hooked. My proof? It just works. Give it a shot yourself.
• Zone Alarm - This seems to be the consensus for being the absolute best free firewall; actually, from what I can tell, it is billed as the best firewall period. As a bonus, the logo is no longer a horrible yellow and purple blur… But seriously, this is great firewall protection and is certainly much safer than the built in firewall in Windows.

Filesharing

• Azureus - For a very cool way to download very *legal* files, you need to use a torrent client. And out of the whole lot, I really like Azureus. It features, by far, the coolest interface. Sure, there are simpler, more stripped down ways to download torrents, but none are as pretty as this! Browsing and downloading files is a real pleasure.
• FileZilla - Whether you are a college student or not, you should always have an FTP client installed on your computer. My client of choice is definitely Filezilla. Not only is it the best, but it is free to boot! To list a few features, it can resume Uploads/Downloads, has drag and drop, and supports firewalls. So, get your blog up and running with Filezilla!
• DivX - Well, if you are going to be downloading all sorts of legal “research” videos courtesy of your schools bandwidth, chances are you will need a DivX player. This little player can handle just about any type of file you might encounter, and for those that won’t open, there are also some great codecs out there too. This is all you need.