I've just been watching Survivors on iPlayer whilst rebuilding an unfortunate old PC that died of deathstaritis. It made me think about surviving the worst case scenarios, what tech would I want to survive a zombie apocalypse? What software should I keep several copies of? Is gentoo the answer? And then I found a worst of all worst case scenarios: What software is essential to survive the windows experience? There are times when one has to rule out (k)ubuntu as an appropriate answer, most often these times are when I don't want to land some kind of implicit support contract, and what am I going to throw on this box I'm rebuilding, and can I prevent it becoming part of the other zombie apocalypse?

So what would I pack in a Windows survival kit?

• Kaspersky Antivirus One of the few things I'd reccommend paying for. If you're not the almighty Timmy (who kept an XP laptop clean for several years (I verified this as part of my paranoia) without any virus scanner through a combination of extreme paranoia, some allegedly '37 skills and probably a lot of luck), then you probably need decent protection. Avast! (free for non-commercial use) is not as good as kaspersky, but still out performs the bain of my existence, Norton. I'd love to recommend something based on ClamAV, but it's not amazingly good.
• Firefox
• Open Office
• InfraRecorder disk burning software
• The Open Disk
• http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html (closed source but highly useful)
• ODIN a disk imager for windows

I know the above is a short list. I'm likely to expand it. My plans for the next few weeks include trying out KDE4 on windows. I'm wondering whether I can save effort by listing the indispensable stuff somewhere so I don't forget about it or have to repeat myself, but there's a catch: if it gets too big it's useless. There are loads of sites out there that offer massive lists of software with a million different ways to do something, and they're next to useless for answering questions quickly and helpfully.