communifications

A littel utility called Dialer. It's kind of clumsy for the purposes that you describe, so you might want to snag a freeware/shareware replacement like PhoneBook 95 or QuickDial Pro.

Al Hedstrom

Theres a free program called Media Ring Talk which at the moment gives you free U.S. long distance calls from PC to phone.
It can be downloaded from - http://freewareandstuff.com/messaging.html

under the heading The Voice for the Net Generation.

Well it depends on what you want to do. If you need to do that through the internet then you can try several sites, some are free like:

http://dialpad.com
http://hottelephone.com

others charge you for that like :

http://net2phone.com

Onthe other hand, if you need to use your PC directly to phone without the internet then you can download a shareware version of any of several utilities that have phone book, answering machine, caller id capabilities.

You can search for these softwares at:

http://www.tucows.com
http://www.download.com
http://www.winfiles.com

Hope this was helpful.

Best Regards,

Rafik El-Raheb.