Free Internet Radio

Pandora Internet Radio is by far the best website for those with a limited music collection. You can create your own radio stations and thumbs-up or thumbs-down songs. The station will work with you and try to develop a sense of your taste of music so you can listen for hours without hearing a bad song. Here are some tips to get you going as well:

1. After 8 or so song skips, Pandora will not let you skip anymore due to licensing laws. Well to overcome that, create a new radio station and click on it. As soon as the new station starts to load, click back on your previous station and the song you wanted to skip will be gone and a new one will start.
2. If you haven't used up all 8 skips (This is the only instance where this will work) and would like to listen to a specific artist (not song), click on the Add More Music button and type in that artist, even if you've added them before. The next song the station plays will be a song by that artist. But make sure you add the artist at the beginning of the currently playing song.
   

Necessary Windows Software

Here is a list of extremely useful software for any college student stuck in the Windows world. This post was inspired by the Crucial Mac Software page .

Microsoft Office 2003: OpenOffice.org is always an option when money is missing, however there are always compatibility problems between the two, and OOO will often have printing problems as well.

Paint.net: A program featured on Lifehacker, Paint.net is a great free alternative to Photoshop for any money-missing college student.

Trillian: A multi-protocol chat client supporting tabbed chatting and their website offers tons of skins for use with the client as well. Great way to save space by not having to install Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger and use all of them at once.

DVDDecrypter: This program is great for any college student wanting to make backups of their hard earned DVD movies. Accompanied with DVDShrink, backing up your DVDs is easier than ever.

DVDShrink: This program takes that large DVD video you just ripped and compresses it to fit on more affordable 4GB DVDs.

Azureus: This is a wonderful bittorrent client that runs well on Windows and has a great looking interface as well.

myTunes: Living in the dorms is a wonderful way to download music off of other users' iTunes folders. myTunes helps you achieve just that.

VLC Media Player: This program will play any video file you put up to it. I use it for every video I ever watch anymore.

I hastily put this list together, so if anyone can think of any, please feel free to comment them in and I will update the post whenever any new ones are added.