Noice Applications

I use a variety of apps in day to day work - many of them free and or open source.

• TrueCrypt - free encryption software for Win / Mac / Linux. Allows the creation of either file or partition containers in any size and a variety of formats. It's fast, the encrypted files are easily portable and fairly secure... I use it every day on the laptop...
• Sun VirtualBox - Open source (and free) virtualisation software. Quick (pretty decent performance anyway) and with some really nice features that makes it great to use on a workstation. I run a XP virtual machine for some occasional testing / development work - just fire up the vbox app, start the vm and I can login in < 30 secs (faster than booting a regular XP machine really). It's easy to resize the VM window (dynamically resizes XP for you) and you can easily swap to full-screen (or RDP to the machine). Very very handy, I've been really impressed with it. Not sure what will happen given that Oracle has now acquired Sun though....
• Utils:
• FileZilla - good open source FTP client, but I'd recommend the 'portable' version (PortalApps) to avoid bothering with installation. I'd also recommend reading some documentation, at this point the default install tends to cache a *lot* of info (e.g. login details)! :/
• Gimp - good graphics editting software. Can't really comment how it compares to photoshop, but it handles everything I need graphics software to do - and it's free. I'd recommend the portable version again here unless you are a really frequent user.
• Scite - a good open source text editor. Not much else to say here.