resizing quality loss

Right now I’m stuck with Microsoft paint to resize my photos and the quality becomes very low. I know that resizing any photos degrades image quality, but is there a program, preferably a free program that resizes photos and retains good image quality?

I didn't even know that Mspaint could resize photos so I did a comparison with ACDSee. Downsizing a 111K JPG 50% using the default settings in ACDSee gave me an JPG of about 50K which looks quite normal. Doing the same in Mspaint gave me a 22K JPG which looks - horrible.

The problem with Mspaint is that it seems to select very agressive compression and you can't adjust it. You're looking for a program that allows you to resize AND select the level of compression.

I think the GIMP can do this but I've never managed to figure out the user interface.

Thank you Franglais. I cant believe ive been using paint for all these years to resize lol.

FastStone Image Viewer is a free download and I usually use it to do a final sharpening after downsizing.

Cheers, Don