You just dropped a wheelbarrow full of cash upgrading your videocard and CPU, leaving only a

little bit of pocket lint left over for software. Relax, Bobby, it’s going to be fine. The truth is that soft-ware is mother-lovin’ expensive. Seven hundred smackers for Photoshop? Pshaw! Thankfully, free and powerful alternatives to the most popular apps abound. Put your PayPal card away and follow along.

GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program if you can’t stand acronyms, is a popular opensource alternative to Photoshop. Don’t let the fact that it’s free fool you; even though it’s not quite as polished or feature-rich as Photoshop, there’s a lot you can do with GIMP beyond just resizing and re-touching. A robust set of integrated tools and an extensive plugin library make it a more-than-capable image manipulator, not just an editor. GIMP is also platform-fl exible in that it supports Windows, Mac OS X, and of course, Linux. FREE, www.gimp.org

What started off as Windows Live OneCare eventually morphed into a capable and free antivirus solution known as Microsoft Security Essentials. Surprisingly effective for a relative newcomer, the latest version adds heuristic scanning and improved Firewall integration. Just be sure you’re rocking a legit copy of Windows. FREE, www.bit.ly/9ikpqC

Don’t need the feature-rich complexity of GIMP? No problem. Most photo-sharing sites, like Flickr and Photobucket, let you make basic changes, but the cool thing about Adobe’s online Photo Express Editor is that it aggregates your photos from those and other portals, including Facebook, and neatly organizes them. You can also upload up to 2GB of photos for free. FREE, www.photoshop.com

KICK MALWARE IN THE NADS… TWICE

Microsoft Security Essentials does an outstanding job at beating back viruses, but sometimes you need an extra bodyguard or two to keep things in line. Unlike antivirus soft ware, which digs deep into your OS, antispyware applications can be run in tandem. Malwarebytes and SuperAntiSpyware provide a potent one-two punch combo, oft entimes catching what the other doesn’t. Combined with Microsoft Security Essentials, you’ll have a three-headed monster that loves to munch on malware. FREE, www.malwarebytes.org and www.superantispyware.com

We love a good Cinderella story, and that’s what we have with LibreOffice. You see, when Oracle took over Sun Microsystems, it created a near-instant riff with the developers of OpenOffice, whose open-source ideology didn’t mesh with Oracle’s proprietary mindset. Several key programmers jumped ship and went on to create Libre-Office, a fork of OpenOffice with the backing of several industry bigwigs, including Canonical, Google, and Red Hat. Ready for the clincher? You can save documents compatible with Microsoft Word (including .docx) sans the heavy price tag! FREE, www.libreoffice.org

Whether you’re rocking a desktop, server rig, or a netbook, there’s a version of Ubuntu designed just for you. Ubuntu is perhaps the easiest of all Linux distros to use, providing a pain-free way of cutting those costly Windows shackles. What about games, you ask? If a title isn’ t supported natively, use WineHQ, which lets you run Windows software in Linux. FREE, www.ubuntu.com and www.winehq.com

We still adore Dropbox, we really do. It’s just that SugarSync is a tad more fl exible. It offers cloud-based fi le syncing, just like Dropbox, and you can easily share fi les between PCs. But SugarSync goes the extra mile by letting you sync multiple folders across multiple systems. We also appreciate its robust mobile platform support (iPad, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices) and remote access from any web browser. You get 5GB for free, and 500MB for every successful referral (if they sign up for a paid plan, you both get an additional 10GB). FREE, www.sugarysync.com

Let Professor Penny Rich and Doctor Deep Pockets debate which is better, Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. Both are great, but both will set you back at least $50. Sir Savea- Lot’s solution? Macrium Reflect, a no-cost cloning program that works with XP, Vista, and Windows 7 in both 32-bit and 64-bit form. With it you can create a disk image even while running Windows, a rare trick for free cloning software. There’s a built-in scheduler and you can even image to a network, USB, or FireWire drive, as well as optical media. FREE, www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

Microsoft continues to improve upon Windows’ built-in partitioning tool, but sometimes it’s not enough. Easeus Partition Master Home Edition comes to the rescue with a robust partition manager priced at 100 pennies less than a buck. It supports hard disks as small as 2GB and as massive as 4TB, and it also works with removable devices. The list of tricks is long, including the ability to extend a system partition; resize, move, merge, split, and copy partitions; redistribute free space; scan a disk for bad sectors; support hardware RAID; rebuild the MBR; convert FAT to NTFS; convert partition types; secure fi le deletion; and more. FREE, www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm