Yes, you would have to be crazy to attempt any serious graphic editing work with Windows Paint, the graphical editor that has been bundled with Windows virtually unchanged since the days of  Windows 3.

However, when I recently upgraded my laptop i had a need for a photo editor fast, and free. I had Photoshop CS2 on my old PC however it was a bit like shooting a gnat with an elephant gun for the type of work I normally do these days. So I did a quick look around as to what was out there and settled on Paint.Net which you can download free from getpaint.net

For such a lightweight program, it really is impressive. The magic wand is great for stripping areas of photos, it has layers so you can mess with stuff and not mess the whole image up.  The undo tool is pretty awesome too when it comes to fixing cockups.

There is also an active community of developers creating plugins and scripts that add functionality.

For all my simple online photo editing and graphic tweaking, this will be my editor of choice.