hey guys, just a quick one - are there any decent chess engines available to download for free (legally) online? if so, what's your recommendation? 

This post was brought to you by someone who is exceptionally cheap and lazy.

Houdini, Stockfish, Firebird for starters in free chess engines.

Next time describe your PC and OS that can't hurt and might help. Being cheap is OK but lazy has its limitations - you can look up a lot of this stuff with minimal search engine skills - trust me on this one. Even searching the forums here for similar questions is often helpful

You can also download Winboard, Arena and other free chess programs to run the engines in - they need a GUI if you don't already have Fritz or some other chess program or DB.

http://www.zfchess.com/engines.html

http://winboard.en.softonic.com/    www.cln.org/searching_faqs.html

 http://www.playwitharena.com/?Download

My 'cheap and lazy' comment was very much tongue in cheek :)

Grand, thanks for the recommendations. I've just got a windows vista laptop, nothing too fancy.

Don't worry about the engines ratings so much as how well they work (or not) on your PC. For instance, Houdini is a real CPU hog so depending on your CPU and total RAM it may not let you do much multi-tasking easily (or at all) I'm down to 1.5 GB RAM (sigh) so I have it analyze when I'm not using my PC. And another engine I forget which one  crashed a lot so I just ditched it, but there's plenty of really good ones to choose from. 

GOOD LUCK!

Stockfish + Tarrasch GUI work well for me.