Microsoft Paint

Microsoft Paint is not the Photoshop for the poor, nor is it a powerful image editor. I've always used it as a simple screen shot capturing tool where I can quickly screen capture, save as GIF (Windows 98 versions of MS Paint could only save as BMP) and upload it to show someone a bug I'm experiencing on a web platform. Are there truly any other uses for this program? Well, yes -- I do recall seeing some really fantastic MS Paint drawings. Search for "MS Paint drawings" and you'll see what I mean -- the Venice one is truly fantastic, although the guy cheated and used Photoshop for some filters afterward so I don't know if we can truly count that ;).

MS Paint has been bundled with Windows since 1.0, although it has evolved greatly to its current iteration (I haven't yet played around with Windows 8 Paint) and Windows XP versions of Paint can apparently be used to scan documents (although I've never used it for that purpose). Windows 7 Paint doesn't feel like Paint. It feels as if I'm using the new version of Microsoft Office, but the problem with that is, MS Paint is not an Office product, hence the Graphics category you see above.

So to start off our MS Paint section, below you will find the version of MS Paint that came with Windows XP. It will work on Windows 7. In fact, you can even replace your Windows 7 Version with MS Paint, by replacing mspaint.exe (probably in c:\\windows\\system32) with the file you download below. Of course, you need to rename it to mspaint.exe as well. Windows 7 Paint is 6.2MB compared to Windows XP Paint being a mere 427KB. Oops!