Great free software programs!

*notepad++ 5.0.2 is a very good text editor, which is important if you are writing your own HTML web page. The latest release clears up crash problems that were frequent with the 4 version. Basically, it serves as a souped up replacement of notepad (which traditionally has come along with Windows). :( -> It only works with Windows, and 95 or later. Space used in MS Windows: 2 MB.
*XnView 1.94.2 is a very handy image editor and organizer. It launches very quickly and you can easily handle jobs like tweaking the contrast on your digital photos, to eliminate darkness that may have come if you shot your picture with a darkening sky. It converts and resizes pictures. It can read a gigantic range (around 400) of different file extension types of pictures. This last feature puts it ahead of Picasa. In terms of organizing your picture archive,you can embed metadata comments into photos. Space used in MS Windows: 4.9 MB.

*GIMP 4.6.2 is a free counterpart to Adobe's Photoshop. All the online reviews I read speak of its power. However, it is not as intuitive as many other programs. On the good news side: Software developers created a help file that can reside in your computer. (A few oddities that reviews skip over: it doesn't come with a help file. So, the help file is a separate download. Installing GIMP requires first installing something called GTK environment. The last thing is safe; it doesn't cause any problem for your computer.) Originally developed for Linux, it is now available for Windows and for Mac OS X. Space used in MS Windows: 14.2 MB.

*OpenOffice 2.4.1 (officially, OpenOffice.org) is a free, open source counterpart to Microsoft Office. It most everything that most people will want with MS Office -exc deal with the obnoxious *.docx extensions that MS Office 2007 creates. It is only a matter of time that they and commercial competitors like Corel create office suite revisions that can read the files. (This might be in the OOo 3 version that is currently under beta development.) Using this in Mac OS X is possible; but this requires installing other programs before installing OOo. Hopefully this last problem will be resolved in the 3 version. Space used in MS Windows: 106 MB.

*KompoZer 0.7.10, free WYSIWYG HTML page editor, replacing NVU editor, which itself was based on Mozilla's Composer. A free counterpart to Adobe's Dreamweaver, MS FrontPage or MS Expression Web. Space used in MS Windows: 6.2 MB.

The source for a number of the programs about is http://sourceforge.net .
A comprehensive site for downloading software programs is http://www.download.com .

All of these are safe with Vista. (The Vista incompatibility problem is mainly with software developed before Vista.)