Screen captures

Ever since Windows 95, the PrintScreen key will take a screen capture by default. The only catch is that it's not obvious to the average user how it works. "Hey, I pressed PrntScr and nothing happened!" Well, as most of you already know, the screen capture is silently stored in the clipboard.

My typical screen capture routine is:

1. Press PrntScr
2. Win-R -> pbrush to launch Paint
3. Ctrl-V to paste into Paint (as of WinXP, it auto-enlarges the canvas without asking)
4. Alt-F4 to quit
5. y (yes to save before quit)
6. Enter a file name
7. TAB -> P (to save as PNG)
8. Enter (save the file and quit)

I've gotten pretty quick at it, but when you want to take several screen shots in a row, it's time to find a better way. Today I finally got around to searching and I found a better way.

I found a slick tool called Screen Print 32. It's just what I've been looking for. After a quick install it runs and I go through its setup screen to pick the options I want:

• Capture Full Desktop or Active Window (just like Windows default behavior)
  
• Capture Key: Prt-Scr (just like Windows default behavior)
  
• Load at Startup: Yes
• Enable Printing: No
• Save Captured Area to Disk: Yes
• Filename: Capture [rdate] [time]
• File Format: PNG
• Folder: \My Documents\My Pictures\Screen Captures

Now the aforementioned eight-step process is down to a single keypress. I simply press the PrntScr key and it pops up a small note to tell me that it's captured the screen (goes away in a couple seconds). Looking in my Screen Captures folder, I can see the .PNG files showing up every time I press PrntScr. I'm happy!