Posted my Annual Free Software Advice last December and despite a wild year in Microsoft development technologies, I don’t have a major updates to this list other than:

• Vista is a solid OS now. It will take more resources then XP and will take you a while to get use to it, but I don’t know of any reason the average home user could not use it. I would not upgrade a current XP computer to Vista, but I also would not downgrade a brand new Vista machine to XP unless I had a specific reason. Bottom line if you buy a new PC use Vista.
• Keep in mind Windows 7 will be out in late 2009.

Since I don’t have any real updates I will give out a couple free tools/web site that I like:

• Woot - they (mostly) sell one thing a day until it sells out. Great deals and very humorous product descriptions.
• Digsby - great multi-client chat tool (AOL-MSN-Yahoo).
• Microsoft Live Search - love the artwork on this search site