Ink-Escape Please

I really want to become a student again.  Yes, because I want to learn more but mostly because of the great discounts you get as a student.  One being the ridiculously overpriced Adobe Creative Suite.  You can buy the student and teacher edition of Suite 5 for $449 as opposed to more than $2,500 for the regular version.  Of course you get more with the full priced version but I only really want Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.  Who knows how to use all those others anyway.

Because I'm not a student...yet....I'm stuck with free versions online which don't even compare.  One in particular that I've been using, Inkscape, is similar to Illustrator.  With my brother's recommendation (computer science genius!), I downloaded it and began my first project: replicating Magnolia's Peach's logo.  I'd like to preserve this logo and not let it get destroyed in a fire or anything.  This proved to be a challenge.  How do you create paths from fonts?  How do you rotate a picture?  How do you use the colors?  These are serious questions.  And the tutorials that are supposed to help you figure that stuff out is very simplistic.  Which isn't a horrible thing, but for such a technical program like this, it blows...

An example of one of the tutorial instructions:

I'm still on the hunt for a better program.  So far others that my brother recommended can only be used on a Linux OS.  I'm pretty basic with computer stuff and use Windows Vista (I know boooo).

I'll post my final version of the Magnolia's Peach logo when I finish it too.