For a computer that has been purchased any time roughly during the past 5 years or so, it probably came with at least one or more picture-viewing programs. There are various exceptions to this depending on what kind of an outlet you bought from. Probably the most regular kind of PC that would not include such a built-in program would be a PC that was built home-made or something along these lines.

There is a fairly simple way get past all these variables and figure out whether or not such programs are on your computer AND already installed and ready to use. Using the File Manager View of "my computer", or what in more recent years is known as "the Explore View", take a look at the file listing (folder view) of these photographs the relative sent you. How did they send them to you? - email?, CD?, or other?. Depending on the answer, the exact steps needed for you to view the Folder View will vary, so I'll sort of skip over that particular step, all though it might be important in your case as to why you are unable to open the photo.... I dunno for sure.

Using the Folder View, right click any one of the photos. The Folder View will list all of these photos as "filenames", and will list them in order, such as
cute picture 1.JPG
cute picture 2.JPG
and so forth.

The realitve who sent these probably came up with their own name for each photo, the above is just an example. For example, right click on the first photo in the list, and a small windows menu will appear with a variety of options. One of the options should be "Open With". By selecting this option, you get the opportunity to instruct windows which photo viewing program you want to use to open the photo. windows should the list whatever photo viewing programs it knows about. If it by chance does not know about any, then this may be your problem. If the list you see only contains a program such as Paint.exe , then this tells me you do not have any photo viewing programs installed on your computer..... you might have some, but they have not been installed your. More routinely, I would expect the menu to list one or more of the following photo viewing programs:
Windows Picture and Fax Viewer;
Microsoft Office Picture Manager;
Internet Explorer;
Paint

As you can see, your standard Internet Browser can be used to view photos, and this generally works fine for people who want to just casually look at photos. In other words, even if you do not have any programs designed exclusively to view photos, you can still sort of limp along using just your Browswer....not the best choice, but at least a choice. Paint does not make a very good picture viewer UNLESS you have some training with Paint and know how to use it. Basicically, you need to determine two main things about your desire to view photos: 1) does your computer have a photo viewing program on it and 2) if yes, is this program already installed? It's very possible that you have the right program but maybe it somehow did not ever get installed, or perhaps was accidentlly un-installed and or deleted.

As for the problem "my window is smaller than the monitor", I'm not sure what you mean BUT I think you are saying that the window has been minimized. If this is the case, all you need to do is maximize the window by clicking the little box graphic in the right top corner of the window, where there are 3 such graphics: hypen, box, and X. If you click X, this closes the window. If you click box, this toggles the view of the window between Maximum size and less-than-maxium.. If you click hyphen, this puts this particular window down on the task bar as an open BUT not in the foreground active window. For instance, if the window is up on your desktop and you can see it's contents, it is said to be in the foreground. If you click the small hyphen, this leaves the program running but moves it down to your task bar where it sort of just hangs out waiting for you to bring it back to the foreground. Often times when people have several windows open at once, they like to keep just one on the foreground and all the others on the task bar, and then they can sort of flip back and forth among these programs one at a time.