SOHOcomputing advice and consulting
SOHO computing - Software Software:

Operating systems: most of you do not have the skills required to use anything other than Windows. Just be sure that you are using either Windows 2000 (Win2k) or Windows XP (WinXp) with the latest service packs installed. Do not browse with Win95/98/ME on the Internet. They are disasters waiting to happen. Windows NT is a more difficult case. It, like 95/98/ME, is no longer supported but it is inherently more secure than Windows 2k and XP. However, there are vulnerabilities in the NT code base (on which 2k and XP are based) that have been patched in 2k and XP but with no patches available for NT.

Browsers:

We recommend Firefox, Thunderbird and the Mozilla suite. These require some extra effort to download and install and master (if you are only used to IE and Outlook) but we feel that they are worth it. Once that you have mastered these alternative browsers/email clients only use IE on trusted sites that do not load in Firefox or Mozilla. There are inherent vulnerabilities in IE and Outlook that Microsoft may never be able to eliminate.
Also consider Opera (available at opera.com). Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozilla can all be downloaded for free from the mozilla.org website.

Office suites: Microsoft Office is the standard but we have been using the free Open Office suite (available at openoffice.org). It covers all of the same ground as MS office for $0.

Website development software: the two standard tools are Adobe's Photoshop and Macromedia's Dreamweaver.
Gimp is a free photoshop like product (gimp.org). If you are willing to invest the time and effort in learning how to use Gimp it will be able to do everything you need (some things are easier than in Photoshop, some more difficult). If you are already an experienced Photoshop user you might not want to spend the time on it except as a back-up app. NVU is a free web authoring tool (nvu.org) about which we have no opinion. Textpad (textpad.com) is a very capable text editor that has some nice HTML coding hooks.

Antivirus software: ZoneAlarm (zonelabs.com), AVG (grisoft.com) and Panda (pandasoftware.com) are the three that we recommend. We do not recommend Norton or McAfee.