SOFTWARE: Send Me a Picture

Microsoft Windows has a screen capture utility. I THINK it involves the printscreen key (which is often spelled PrntScrn (or some combination of Prnt, Pnt, Prn and a corruption of Screen). It's also one-half of a shared key with the SysReq (aka SysRq, SystemRequired) key. It's all so confusing. And not very good. When it works, it doesn't give you much in the way of options with what to do with it.

Generally speaking, it's a good thing to seek out a free alternative to handle all of your screen capturing needs.

My personal choice is Gadwin Screen Capture, now in version 4.0. You can download the program here.

Part of what makes me like Gadwin is that I can choose easily to send my instant screen shots to the clipboard, the printer or to a file, or any combination of the three. It also lets me choose to do the whole screen or just a selected rectangle, which is what I prefer all of the time. There are also settings that let you choose to be fussed with by the program, or get no fussing whatsoever. That's the one I like, no splash window, no alerting when the picture snapshot is complete and no reviewing the image after the fact. Just copy and then paste into whatever application I want.

Examples of what I use it for includes producing documentation of programs. I run the program here, take a snapshot and then paste it into Pagemaker, where I'm making the documentation. Flip back to the program, go to the next window or process. Repeat until finished. Since pictures tell a thousand words, it's very effective. Another use I get is to paste how-to pictures into emails. Again, it cuts down on potential confusion a WHOLE lot.

Gadwin isn't perfect. I honestly occasionally wish it had a quick and easy way of adding lines, circles, pointers AND text. If I JUST need the latter one, I can paste the clipboard-saved picture into Irfanview and add from there. But some people JUST NEED a line and an arrow to see what's obviously staring back at them from the screen.

Interestingly enough, the web-site, Confessions of a Freeware Junkie, compared screen capture utilities in a recent post. It's highest rated program was Screenshot Captor (available here). One of the reasons it rated highly, was the ability to edit after-the-fact. It's a little over-kill feature-wise and the original review of the product indicated it couldn't send pictures directly to the printer, but that misapprehension has been corrected. Judge the complexity issue by the fact that an experienced computer user had trouble finding the setting. On the other hand, I was intrigued enough that I am giving it a trial myself.

Also, look through the full review by the Freeware Junkie of ALL of the products. There might be something in there that attracts you to one of the other programs.

In the meantime, if you see a screenshot of my computer in an email, it will probably continue to be from Gadwin. Easy to use. Easy to set up. Always right there for when I need it.