Let me say I wasn’t too happy when I had to take on the Windows Vista machine left to me because someone bought it while I was out of the office only to discover it would not work for their needs. Over the months I have slowly been won over by my vista machine and the regular bug fixes and problem solutions from MS go a long way to resolving the occasional crash or system instability.
Making my way through the features of Windows Vista I have discovered a screenshoot capture utility called the sniping tool, as both an on-again and off-again blogger and IT professional having an integrated tool that lets me take screenshots is a great time saver also it is nice that I don’t have to install a third party program to do something that should be a function of the OS.
The Snipping Tool is able to take full-screen, window, rectangular or free-form screen captures and open it in an editor. In the editor you can highlight parts of the screen capture, or free form draw on the screen capture.
Some shots of the snipping tool:
Interface
Editor
Highlighter in Action
So how do you get to the Snipping Tool? Well there are three ways:
1. Type SnippingTool into the search box on the start menu
2. Goto Start>All Programs>Accessories
3. Goto Start>Run and then type snippingtool
Once you have found the Snipping Tool I would reccomend assigning a shortcut key to it. To do so right-click the snipping tool shortcut select properties I use ctrl + alt + q
While I found the Snipping Tool to be a much need improvement over XP’s built-in screenshot tool (print screen) if you take screenshots regularly then you will probably want to try either Techsmith’s SnagIT ($$) or Snippy (free). However if your running Vista and just need to do the occassional screenshot then the Snipping Tool offers some great features.
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