Fractint, despite being a DOS program, can produce some beautiful images once you get used to it. It is not hard to memorize a few key combinations to make it work neither it requires you to be a computer geek to use it (I'm not one!). Of course I probably don't use half of its resources, but those I know how to use are enough to make some great images, to me at least. If your mouse is properly set to work in DOS, you can use it too for zooming. I've been using Fractint since 1996 (I think) and some of my favourite images are still made with it. The only reason that it may have messed things up is probably because you tried to use the wrong video settings. It doesn't support true colour mode (it does, but it sucks), so depending on the selected mode it makes your screen go black - nothing than a ctrl-alt-del can't fix. Also a drawback could be the 256 colours, but you can also import the PAR files into UF and change things. Also it has the excellent "Evolution" mode - select a formula, hit CTRL-E and it creates N new images for you. There's a "Winfract" version that works in Windows but it's not as good as the DOS version.