Windows 3.x users will be familiar (if not exactly in love) with Windows PaintBrush, and Paint was the replacement in Windows 95. While still not Paint Shop Pro by any stretch of the imagination, it was a workable paint program and bitmap editor. Like many other accessories, it has appeared in surprisingly familiar form in Windows 98.

Creating images from scratch is simple, and these are limited in size only by memory and your patience. The standard paint program set of tools are provided, including (see image, left to right, top to bottom) select, erase, fill, pick color, magnifier, pencil, brush, airbrush, text, line, curve, rectangle, polygon, ellipse and rounded rectangle.

Paint can use up to 16 million colours, and can save files in various colour depths, but still only in .BMP format. These files can be read by any reasonable software these days, but they're not usable on the Web, where you'll need .GIF or .JPG files instead. They're also very large, as they have no compression at all. You can load and save colour pallettes seperately from the images themselves, which is useful for sequences of pictures.