I'd like something that muppets like me can use to do simple colour fiddling, cropping and other basics without needed a degree in Photoshop. What does everybody use (on XP for my laptop please)?

Google Picasa?

I just tried to get you a link for Windows, but Google, being clever and helpful, noticed I'm using a Mac and sent me to the relevant page.

GIMP usually gets good mentions, though I haven't personally used that.
I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (which works just as well on a Windows machine as it does on a Mac). There's a full feature 30 day trial available.

Mark

Thanks guys, I'm not too keen on anything from Google tbh, because of my prejudices toward people trying to take over the world. Although I bet Picassa is probably great like everything else they do.

Gimp looked to me to be virtually as complicated as PS. Does Lightroom have a shallower learning curve?

Any other suggestions, or is everybody a CS user?

Lightroom would be the best overall option, I reckon.

Failing that, Photoshop Elements would get a vote, but then you don't get the management side LR would give you, and it would get messy with multiple files cluttering up the place if you decide to play with an image.

It was the easiest bit of software I've ever had the pleasure of getting to grips with.
I saw two people using it, thought it looked good, installed it on my computer and was up and running with it in next to no time.
Your experience may vary, but if you want my personal recommendation, Lightroom gets it.

Mark

What's the difference between Lightroom and Elements then (apart from craploads of money)?

Would Elements not be better for a spacker like me?

I'm another happy Lr user. It's more of a "workflow management tool" in pretensions speak - basically it does all the looking after of your photos. It's not cheap, but it's really awesome.

Sorry but I've no idea. Never even looked at Elements.

Mark

Sounds to me like it wants to organise my photos and do bulk adjustments. I suppose I could give it a go. Thanks guys.

It can do bulk adjustments, but it's just as happy doing single adjustments to individual images.
It doesn't organise my photos at all.
I import to my Mac, tell Lr where the images are stored and it loads them from there.
It doesn't replace, remove or rearrange them in any way, shape or form.

Mark

That's very different (as I'm sure we've discussed before) to how I use it. I import, manage, process and export from within Lr these days. (8-)

Yep.
I was just letting Oke know that there's more than one way to use the software.

Mark

And I muchly appreciate that.

Yesterday, I was called around to look at a mate's sister's PC because "she's a spaz and she's broken it".

I get there and find there's 125mb of freespace on her OS drive and 300gig on an empty second partition! So I ask her what she stores on the PC and she says photos and music.
So thinking it'll be simple enough to move some stuff and then it might be able to come back to life, I ask her, "Where do you keep you're music?"
"It's all in Realplayer". Well no, it isn't. It's in a folder(s) somewhere on your hardrive and you just think it's in Realplayer because a) your sister was right about you and b) you're one of the millions who allow applications to control their data. I don't.

Thanks Mark, I'll give it a go (8+)

It's not a bad thing. If you want plebs using computers you can't expect them to organise things properly themselves (rant about this to follow on my blog soon). For the rest of us it's not a bad thing either as we know where and how these applications are storing things.