How to open photos on windows?

I have a windows Vista HP TouchSmart and I wanted to ask if there's anyway I can open my photos from my SD card using a USB without using Windows Photo or live gallery? I want to open my photos with something else but don't know how or what. Is there a way I can open it with something else? I don't have photoshop, I have gimp. But i'm not asking on how to open it using gimp. Just anything else besides windows gallary photo. Because there's an update for RAW files and its not working and I tried 3 times and it still doesn't support RAW. I shoot RAW+FINE. Using a Nikon D3100.

Right-click on the picture in windows explorer and when the right-click menu comes up select 'open with'; this should give you a list of programs that windows deems suitable for you to open the picture with.

Alternatively, you can install something like Picasa, whose file-type associations can be set so that it's the program that automatically opens picture files when double-clicked.

Best free program for this is Irfan View. Go to the home page and download the version for your operating system. Make sure you download the plug-in pack as well otherwise it will not read RAW. I have been using this to browse my RAW images from my D300 and D70 for the last 5 years.

Windows can't display RAW images without a codec - your camera may not be supported by the current Windows codec.

Either that or you will need to open it in an image editor that supports RAW, such as GIMP (+UFRAW plugin) or Photoshop (with Adobe Camera RAW plugin) or even Google Picasa can do it.

Google Picasa is free here http://picasa.google.com/
UFRAW for GIMP is here: http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/
Adobe Camera RAW for Photoshop is here: http://www.adobe.com/...xtend.html

Note: You don't need the Windows RAW codec for any of these 3 programs to display RAW images.