So I got myself a nifty new computer and decided to go completely legit and get rid of the last few bits of pirate software I'd been using. What I'm looking for is advice on which web authoring software to buy. I've been using Dreamweaver MX for the last decade. Is that what people still use these days? What else is good? Is there anything out there as good as Dreamweaver but cheaper? I've tried KomPozer but didn't really like it. Thanks in advance.
There is nothing that's "as good as Dreamweaver but cheaper." That's like saying there is something "as good as Photoshop but cheaper." Sure, there are packages of varying prices (including free) that cover some or many of the features of those top-end products, but you aren't going to find something for little or no money that does virtually everything a Dreamweaver or Photoshop does. In any case, here is a list of free HTML editors for Windows.
The one that I've found to be the closest to Dreamweaver is one called Evrsoft 1stPage. I've used the 2000 version for a long time, and there's a newer 2006 version, both of them free. http://www.evrsoft.com/1stpage3.shtml
I don't know how skilled you are at coding, or how much effort you're willing/able to apply to your website endeavors, but any decent coding text editor (like Notepad++ on Windows, or Espresso on the Mac) will put you leaps and bounds ahead of the game. It may not be as simple as dragging and dropping controls onto the page, but you'll find your hand-coded site to be leaner, faster, less mysterious, and easier to maintain than anything any WYSIWYG editor will create.