Take Better Screen Shots in Windows 7 or Vista

Posted by izwan00 in January 11th 2009

If you’re often take a screen shot on your PC, you’re already noticed some inefficiency of Windows built-in screen capture software. Windows 7 and Vista has a lot of improvements over Windows XP by adding a Snipping Tool that can capture a rectangle, a single window, or a free-form shape. But, the built-in tools still unable to capture the mouse pointer, and doesn’t have a timer.

Windows 7 Snipping Tool

If you plan to take a screen shots for your software documentation – in order to create illustrations to give more understanding for your software users, those limitations could be a problem and you need to do extra job of capturing what is happening on your screen. Without a timer, for example, it is impossible to capture a drop-down menu unless you press the ‘Print Screen’ button on your keyboard, but you need to crop the picture to get only the area you need. But even you get the screen shot you want, the Windows built-in screen capture tools still can’t capture your mouse pointer.

WinSnap
WinSnap

The tool that I like to use to capture screen shots (and I capture a lot of them) is NTWind Software’s WinSnap. Yes, it able to 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, so you don’t have to install it.

WinSnap In Action