In no particular order:
Space Sniffer
This tells you what is using the space on your hard drive in a visual form. Tiny and free! One of the most useful utilities ever made!
http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/index.html
Crystal Disk Info
According to wikipedia, there is no official standard used by all manufacturers to interpret S.M.A.R.T. data and notify users about dying hard drives. With Crystal Disk Info, you can read the data yourself and get the exact values reported by the drive yourself.
http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html
*NOTE: the 'Reallocated Sectors Count' is read via the 'Raw Values' column, so don't panic when you see a high value in other columns.
Crystal Disk Mark
You can use this to specify your sector size or test for all sizes. There are many other similar apps like it but this is simple and pain free.
http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html
Irfan View
One of the most efficient utilities you will come across, it opens in a blink to show almost any picture format known to man. It even plays some videos and you can make simple edits to images also. It is regularly updated and even supports plugins and skins. I regularly use it to resize/shrink pictures to email or to post to this blog.
http://www.irfanview.com/
Easeus Partition Magic
I have been using this for years and there is still a free version for home use. The software is practically child's play for doing a very serious task of creating, resizing, deleting etc. of partitions.
http://www.partition-tool.com/
*NOTE: Please ensure you have a proper backup of your data from the hard drive to be worked on before modifying partitions. It is best to have a UPS or properly working laptop battery while partitioning as power loss during any of the operations could result in data loss.
Easeus Disk Copy
If you want to migrate to a bigger/faster/more efficient hard drive you can just clone all your data to a new hard drive and sktip over reinstalling all your programs and settings!
http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/
Another disk cloner is Reflect by Macrium:
http://www.macrium.com
VLC Media Player
It's portable, and plays almost anything video or audio. A worthy mention is Combined Community Codec Pack, which is a codec pack that boosts Windows Media Player's capabilities. Between the two of these you can play almost anything under the sun.
http:/www.videolan.org/vlc
For anything VLC cannot play I use the Community Codec Pack at:
http://www.cccp-project.net/
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