Software

I prefer open source programs. Below are a list of good, free options for most your computer work:

Film and Art:

Blender 3D
Blender is a 3D animation program released as free software. It can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications.

GIMP
The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is a raster graphics editor used to process digital graphics and photographs. Typical uses include creating graphics and logos, resizing and cropping photos, altering colors, combining multiple images, removing unwanted image features, and converting between different image formats.

Inkscape
Inkscape is a vector graphics editor application. Its stated goal is to become a powerful graphic tool while being fully compliant with the XML, SVG and CSS standards.

celtx
Celtx is a free screenwriting software for writing and formatting a screenplay to meet the screenplay submission standards set by the theater and film industries; it is licensed under the Celtx Public License, which is the Mozilla Public License with an attribution provision. Celtx permits the author to include photos, video, and audio in their screenplay. It also provides features for collaborating with other authors. It is available in 19 languages.

audacity.sourceforge.net
Audacity is a free digital audio editor application. Audacity is cross-platform, using the wxWidgets software library to provide a similar graphical user interface on several different operating systems. It is currently used in the OCR National Level 2 ICT course for the sound creation unit.

Office and Web:

OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org is an office application suite available for a number of different computer operating systems. It supports the ISO standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) for data interchange as its default file format, as well as Microsoft Office ’97-2003 formats, among many others.

Notepad++
Notepad++ is a free source code editor for Windows. The project is hosted on SourceForge.net, from where it has been downloaded over eight million times.
Notepad++ supports syntax highliting for ASP, Ada, ASCII art, Assembly, AutoIt(Limited support for AutoHotKey), BAT, C, C#, C++, Caml, CSS, doxygen, FORTRAN, HTML, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, KiXtart, Lisp, Lua, makefile, Matlab, Objective-C, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PostScript, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Unix Shell Script, Smalltalk, SQL, Tcl, TeX, Verilog, VHDL, VB/VBScript, and XML.
Furthermore, users can define their own language by using the built-in User Language Define System, which makes Notepad++ extendable, to have syntax highlighting and syntax folding.

FileZilla
FileZilla Client is a free, open source, cross-platform FTP client. Binaries are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It supports FTP, SFTP, and FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS). As of August 10, 2007, it was the 12th most popular download of all time from SourceForge.net