Gifs SOS

There appears to be some very intelligent people on this forum so I thought I'd I see if anybody out there could please help me with my gif dilemma. I'm running a new laptop with windows 7, it used to play gif animations in windows pic viewer but lately it only shows a still picture. I've tried searching the internet about this but all I can find is a lot of comments saying that I cant view gifs in the viewer and should just open them in my internet browser or download an independent viewer. They used to work just fine and I'd prefer if I could fix the problem than start using other programs etc....anybody got any ideas???? Thanks for your time