7-Zip is a full featured compression program for making, and extracing various forms of compressed files such as .zip, .tar, .bz2, and .7z. When compressing files 7zip generally can compress files down more than the default windows program, or even other programs such as Winzip.

  InfraRecorder is an excellent CD/DVD burning suite. It's free, and it's quite powerful, and easy to use. If you don't already have a burning program, or even if you do for that matter, I would recommend downloading and giving this one a try.

  This software will test various storage devices such has your hard drive, flash drive, etc... Using various types of tests it will tell you both your read and write speeds. This information is nice to make sure your computer is running up to the specs it's suppose too. It's also a nice tool to have if your a speed enthusiast like myself.