DELL Inspiron 600M with older parallel port floppy drive

[sindi]

The two things my partner wanted to use Faststone (XP) for are to scale and to crop. He gave up on scaling with mtpaint when it gave some error message about not enough memory and nothing else worked as he expected.

Since I am not also dyslexic, I read the error message and in Preferences doubled the 32MB on the top line (for undo) to 64MB.
The photo was 5MB 3888x3888 pixels. Scaled it to 640x640. (Do NOT 'resize' - it removes everything except a 640x640 area in the image).

Cropping: use mouse to draw a rectangle around the area you want to keep. Fine adjustments with arrow keys, watching pixel numbers in lower right. (Do NOT then click on scissors because that erases the part you want to keep). Click on 'crop' in the menu, scale to 640x640, Save as.

Result: two photos suitable for posting to a site that shrinks everything to 256x256 pixel squares. No need for XP.

My partner says mtpaint is a bit simpler than faststone and keeps its settings. It is easy to use already. The slow part is typing difficult-to-spell bean names such as Alice and reading my handwriting (which we may replace with computer text).

Thank you all for the helpful info about mtpaint, pcmcia cards, parallel ports, etc.. We now have 35 bean photos in progress and 40 left to take. With many ways to transfer photos.