Foolestroupe -

I don't find any info on my surviving Win98SE machine relating to any standard Win98 thumbnail or preview capability. If you have a program to view thumbnails, it's apparently an add-on - or at least something that's not in the baseline Win98. I had a couple thumbnail programs on the machine when I was using Win98 regularly, and I'd agree that most of them were "less than perfect." At least one of them may have come with the Win98 "PlusPack," but I've taken most of that stuff off of the old beast.

In WinXP, Windows Explorer allows you to use "thumbnail" view for any files on the machine. If it recognizes the filetype as a "picture," it will show you a thumbnail "mini-picture." Otherwise it will usually show the icon for the program that's set up to open the file. (Windows 2000 also has this capability - I don't know about WinME.) Office programs are similarly "updated." When you select "Insert Picture" in Word, it always opens the folders in thumbnail mode, so you actually see the picture before you insert it (not always what you want, but that's how it's set up).

If you're actually going to "do something" with pictures, you'll likely still want a graphics program of some sort, but just for looking at them to find the one you want, the thumbnail view is pretty handy. I use it to go through digital photos and add names and descriptions to the file names, since it's quicker than using any of my graphics programs (although the browser in my Photoshop Elements gives much more detailed file info, bigger "thumbs," and is almost as "agile.")

WinXP also has a "picture preview" program (Image Viewer) that lets you open any common graphic file type to look at it at full screen size. You shouldn't have any problems looking at any .jpg, .gif, .bmp, .tif, or even the old .wmf with the options built into Windows XP. About the only really common "graphics" file it won't display with the built-ins is .ps (PostScript).

They also, I believe, still include Windows "Paint" with all current versions of Windows, so you can draw pictures. They claim you can use it to edit photos, but I have more respect for my lousy photos than to subject them to it (ok, you can do some things to a photo with it, but it's pretty crude).

As far as changing the picture viewer, that's no problem if it's an "XP compatible" program. I use Photoshop Elements 2.0 for the default to open all graphics files on my WinXP and Win2K machines - including the .ps files. We've also used Adobe Illustrator in similar fashion on Win2K and Win98SE, but once you've used PE2 you can't/won't go back......

John