I used the Gimp, which you can download freely
here. It is almost as good as Photoshop is (even better when it comes to saving in exotic file formats - like .PNG

).
Irfanview, that Drengin mentioned above is great as well, as long as you only need to cut/resize and convert a picture - in fact it achieves the best resample results i have seen so far. But it does lack more sophisiticated editing functions.