A couple folks have asked me how I am able to take a picture and add arrows and text to it to simplify the process of communication when troubleshooting, so i thought I would post the answer for all who are interested.
The program I use is called Irfanview. It has been around since the computer stone age began.
It is FREE, really. I have sent in donations from time to time because I love the app.
A link to the website is here:
http://www.irfanview.com/
A quick list of the main features I use are:
Control-R - Reduction
F12 - Open the paint dialog.
Once you open this you can use the Arrow and Text tool to append your images
You can change the arrow and text foreground/background colors by clicking on them and selecting a new one.
You can set the line thickness (I usually use 6)
When drawing an arrow, it draws a line at the start and an arrowhead at the end.
Control-Z UNDO (I use this a lot when not happy with the placement of things)
It also has an amazing feature called batch processing.
You can open the batch processing feature, select from one to an entire directory of files, choose the effect from resizing, to renaming, to changing the gamma, and anything else you can think of, you can select a new target location and click begin to have it process them all.
For example, I select a folder full of 3000x2000 images, tell it to resize to 25%, and append "_SM" to the filename, then select a subfolder called "small" (it will create it on the fly if needed) and then start the batch process. 1 minute later I have a whole folder of resized files to be able to post with.
I hope this is useful for folks.