Quick and easy screen capture

Here's quick little tip for capturing a screen shot. Ever get an error screen that you need a copy of, or maybe you want to save that high score screen, just to prove you pwned everyone in Counter Strike. Or perhaps you'd like a print out of a screen from some program that doesn't have a print option.

First thing you need to do is capture the screen. That's easy enough. Just press (and hold) the ctrl key + the shift key + the Prt Scr key. Don't feel bad if you don't see the Prt Scr key right away, it's on the top row near the right end. So once you've pressed the three magic keys, all at the same time, your screen has been captured by microsoft and will forwarded to the FBI for further inspection. Well, probably not, but your screen shot is stored in memory just waiting to be pasted somewhere.

Now that your screen is in memory you can paste it into a graphics editor. One that is built into windows is mspaint. Rather than dig through the menus for it, just click on start and on your start menu you should have run. When you click on run it will open a dialog box and you can type mspaint in there and press enter. This will launch mspaint. One other way you can get to mspaint quickly is to press the windows key and the r key. That will also launch the run command and then you type mspaint and hit return. Once you have mspaint open, or any other graphic editing program, you just need to paste your screen shot into it. You can go to the edit menu and down to paste. I prefer to use ctrl-v to paste. The ctrl-v command works in any widows program to paste whatever you have copied, in this case it was our screen capture. You don't have to use mspaint, in fact just about any other graphics program would be better, but mspaint comes with windows. You can also use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and even Microsoft Word. Once you have your image in your graphics editing program, you can crop it, edit it, save it and/or print it.

So to sum it up. First, capture your screen by pressing ctrl+shift+PrtScr. Then open mspaint or your grpahics editing program of choice. Then paste your screen shot, press and hold the ctrl key and press the v key.

Now lets see that PrtScr key finally get a little attention.