Thread: Take Better Screen Shots in Windows Vista or XP

IF YOU TAKE a lot of screen shots on your PC, you're well aware of the limitations of Windows' built-in screen capture tools. Windows Vista significantly improved on XP by adding a Snipping Tool that can capture a single window, a rectangle, or a free form shape. But it still can't show what the mouse pointer is doing, and it lacks a timer.

If you need to grab screen shots for business projects-in order to create. illustrations for software documentation, say-those iimitations can make doing a thorough job of capturing what's happening on your screen extremely difficult. Without a timer, for instance, it's hard to capture a drop down menu unless you go to the trouble of grabbing the entire screen and then subsequently cropping the picture down to the area you need. And even then, the mouse pointer won't appear in the image at all.



The tool that I like to use to capture screen shots (and I capture a lot of them) is NTWind Software's Win Snap. Yes, it can capture the mouse pointer, and you can set a delay timer (to the millisecond, if you want to be obsessively precise) to snap an action that takes a moment to set up. One especially cool feature of WinSnap: It can capture multiple windows in a single application while ignoring everything else that appears on the screen (though this trick doesn't always work). It even has tools to handle the color and look of the screen shot. And it's portable.