Awesome drawing program it can create animated gifs,multi layer graphics, clear background images. Also great for photo touchup. Rival to Photoshop but its free and open source. WARNINGS: 256-colour mode doesn't work. Use at least HiColor (thousands of colors, 16-bit colors). TrueColor (millions of colors, 24- or 32-bit colors) is a must for serious work, of course. GIMP for Windows is not really targeted at end-users yet. The program(s) might crash unexpectedly or behave otherwise strangely. (But of course, so do many commercial programs on Windows.) The stability seems to depend a lot on the machine, display drivers, other software installed, and whatnot. Presumably the more memory you have, the better GIMP works. For any real image work, I would say 128 megabytes is minimum. Many people do find GIMP very useful.