Synergy
Cost: $10 open source
Synergy is an amazing little program that is capable of sharing a keyboard, mouse and clipboard over multiple machines. Synergy works on almost all platforms that have the capability to use a shared keyboard and mouse (IOS, Symbian, etc. are not able to run) Currently the system works on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and is capable of mixing the distributions in your setup, e.g. Linux server with Mac and Windows clients (not restricted however)
VLC Media Player
Cost: $0 Open Source
VLC is the Swiss army knife of all media players; I have been using VLC since it was around version 0.7 or 0.8. This media player is light full of features and has a neat and tidy interface. As a media player, streamer and transcoder/encoder it does a wonderful job.
Google Chrome
$0 Open Source
As I am quite a fan of most of the software and services that Google comes out with, I am naturally a user of Google chrome. Before I started using Google chrome I was a user of Mozilla Firefox since version 1.5 then merged over to Google chrome, I still quite frequently use Mozilla Firefox, but prefer the chrome add-ons, speed and stability to Firefox.
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Windows 10 Pro
$149, Closed Source
I know a lot of people are going to think that I am crazy for choosing Windows 10 over Windows 7 but I prefer the speed of Windows 10 over the speed of Windows 7. I find Windows 10 to start up and launch applications much faster than Windows 7. Windows 10 also consumes much less RAM than Windows 7 allowing for better multitasking.
I find that with even some of my older hardware windows 10 will play much nicer with them than windows 7 does.
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Microsoft Office 365
$99.99 per year
With office 365 I get bonus monthly Skype minutes as well as 1TB of storage on One drive. I also use LibreOffice but find that with allot of documents it does not render properly or maintain the properties and security of the document adequately.
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Software I recomend and Use
This page displays some of the software that I use on a regular basis and have found to do the jobs I want perfectly without many issues.
Other Smaller Software I use
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APCUPSD - Open source software to control and use APC UPS's
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Malwarebytes Free - Great for doing system scans and check-ups
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Glary Utilities Pro - Helps clean and maintain my computers
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File Zilla - Great FTP server and Client
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Opera Web browser - I use this for browsing and testing in an alternative browser.
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VMware Workstation - Great virtualization Platform when running windows
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Parallels Desktop - Great for running boot camp on my mac
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CPU-z - Great for finding basic hardware information on a system
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Intelliremote - To be able to use almost any device as a remote on my computers