Dev-C++/MinGW + GCC is great for many things.
First, it's free (as in speech and beer).
Secondly it's the GCC compiler, which is great.
But on the other side, if you're writing hacks you may find that MinGW doesn't have the best support for the Windows API and some things will be hard to do without a lot of research into the Dev-C++ way.
Still, I recomend it, especially for those who are new to programming in C/C++