you guys know of a way I can edit JPGs easily? When I zoom in with windows at 8x to do the editing, it looks really weird. And when I convert them to GIF the quality goes down, and when I reconvert, it still looks like a GIF.
Well, you're going to have a serious problem no matter what you use to edit them. JPEGs use a lossy compression format (that is, some image data is sacrificed in the name of file size), and without going in to too much detail, at lower levels the image is blurry and hard to distinguish. There's not much you can do about this, that's just the way the format works. You can try using a paint program with a sharpen filter, this might help. As for converting to gif, depending on the image dithering of your editing program, a gif can come out much worse looking than a JPEG because gifs only support 256 colors while a JPEG can use up to truecolor. If you convert a gif to JPEG, it will look really bad--not only will it have (up to) 256x less color data, it will be recompressed over the original JPEG, making it look even worse.
Simply put: Use .jpg for photos. Use .gif for small, fewer color images. Use .png for everything else. It can do both truecolor, and the 256 colors of gif, depending on what you need. And unlike .jpg, it is lossless. If you convert a .jpg to .gif, you're losing a _lot_ of colors, and converting it back to .jpg is going to do nothing to help.
For a cheap and simple photo editor, try JASC Paint Shop Pro. It has a nifty feature that allows you to change the amount of compression used when saving a JPG file. The higher the compression the lower the quality and smaller the file size. The default setting works really good, though, and there isn't much need to play with it.
Can Windows really zoom in at 8x? I suppose you meant you used Microsoft Paint to zoom in at 800%. If you wanted to edit JPEG pictures, then I'd have to agree with Zero 9; Photoshop is the ideal picture editor. If you wanted to just resize a JPEG image and don't have Photoshop, then I'd recommend ResizeImage. Just visit its website and look at the demonstration to judge for yourself.
Also, if you're too poor to afford Photoshop and don't want to warez it, The Gimp is a reasonably powerful free image editing program, though the Win32 port seems to be lagging a bit.
