If you're using Windows (which I am) you just have to configure the operating system to make the option of Japanese input available to you. Here's a website that gives you detailed instructions on how to do this:
How to enable Japanese display and typing ability in Windows XP - Bemanistyle [dot] com Forums
Once you've got it setup, there will be some little icons in your task tray that you can use to change the language of your keyboard. Just click on the icon for Japanese input then you can type out hiragana characters by just sounding them out in romaji. For example, if I've got Japanese language input selected, then if I type the letters "ka" it makes the hiragana character か. If I type out an actual japanese work like "uchi" at first it makes the hiragana うち. After typing that word, if I hit the space bar (actually I have to hit it twice), it will give me a list of kanji characters that have the same sound as "uchi". In this case it could be 家 or 内 or 中 or a few others because that sound is common to quite a few different words. So you use your arrow keys to select the appropriate kanji from the list to match your intended meaning. It took me a while to get used to typing in Japanese when I first started studying but I've since gotten the hang of it.
No stroke count needed. Of course if you're trying to read something and have no idea how to pronounce the kanji, you can look it up with an online dictionary where the kanji can be found by stroke count or radicals (the kanji's component parts). Multiradical lookup is my prefered method for finding the readings of unfamiliar kanji:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/c...wwwjdic.cgi?1R
Another handy tool for when you're learning to read Japanese online is the Rikaichan plugin for the Firefox browser. When you enable Rikaichan, you can hover your mouse pointer over Japanese words and it'll return the reading in hiragana as well as the definition in English (or some other supported language). Rikaichan is my life-saver since I can only read a little more than a thousand kanji at the moment. It helps fill in the blanks for me.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2471
Good luck with your studies.