Adobe PhotoShop is also about $900 (US) for the photo program, and about the same for the "movie" adjunct.

Adobe also is pushing a "no purchase/rent by the year" policy to assure that you'll keep paying every year as long as you use the program.

PhotoShop Elements was introduced some time ago, for those who only wanted to do photo editing, and started off when introduced at about $30 (US), but has now "grown up" to about $90 (last time I looked, probably more for the latest?) per copy. When first introduced, many who had full Photoshop also had, and preferred, PhotoShop Elements for editing their camera outputs. They've largely ceased talking about it, so I assume they're less impressed, as I am, with the newer versions of Elements.

Version 2 included about anything you'd want for photo editing, but without many of the other capabilities of the full Photoshop that allowed creating images; but later versions have incrementally removed quite a few of the most useful tools, to the point that versions 7 and 8, both of which I have, are useless for me, so I still use the "obsolete" ver 2.

Back to the original subject: Assuming that you have a copy of the program you want to use, WinXP includes a choice to "run as" so that WinXP "pretends it's an earlier version to run a specific program that won't otherwise run well on WinXP." This was sometimes a way to carry an older program into WinXP with mostly complete usefulness. Vista claimed to have the same feature, but my experience with my very few attempts to use it in Vista indicated "less successful" carryover.

Later windows versions generally recommend creating a "virtual machine" using the older OS, but the old OS must be installed before the new version is put on the machine, and you must tell the new OS during its installation to "keep the old stuff separate" for this to be very successful. Instructions don't look too complicated, but might be confusing for inexperienced people.

This is a little different than a "dual boot" installation that lets you choose either/any of a couple of/or several Operating systems, to run them one at a time.

Neither the virtual machine nor the multiple boot methods are particularly easy for less experienced users to manage, unless there's a critical need for which there's no other solution.

John