There’s always a need for a good, simple text editor when you need to edit text files or make up a simple document (a blog post, perhaps?). Windows comes with Notepad, but that’s about as bare-bones as you can get. A much more powerful, yet still free, alternative is Notepad++. It’s especially useful for programmers, with its syntax highlighting and auto-complete, among other features, but it has things that everybody can use, such as a tabbed multi-document interface. It has quickly replaced Notepad for me, and will no doubt do it for anybody else looking for a good editor.