Information Madness

How do you take a picture of what is on your computer screen? Why do you need to take a picture of your computer screen? There are a couple of reasons. First, the screen capture may be required to send that image to the technical support people to highlight a problem that you may be experiencing. The second reason is that you may like to show off your desktop screen saver to someone.

For the Windows users, look for the 'Print Screen' key. It will usually come coupled with the System Request key on the keyboard. It will be like this, `Prt Sc/Sys Rq’. If you press this key, the entire screenshot will be sent to your clipboard or desktop. Then, you can open an image editing program like Microsoft Paint and hit Ctrl+V to paste the image into the program. You can now go to the `File’ menu and choose `Save As’ and save the image to a folder that you can attach later to an eMail. Windows Vista and Windows 7 come with a `Snipping Tool’ that is a screen capturing tool. With this, you can identify the screen areas to capture, define the capture and share via eMail. To reach the `Snipping Tool’, go to Start>All Programs>Accessories> Snipping Tool. Click the down arrow next to the `New’ key to select your snipping type.

The Mac OS X users also have built-in screen capture functionality. The screenshot will be saved to the desktop as a `png’ file. To capture the entire screen, press Cmd+Shift+3 at the same time. A select area of the screen can be taken by pressing Cmd+ Shift +4. The cursor will turn into a crosshair and you can drag around the area to be captured. In the `Utilities’ folder under `Applications’, OS X System has a tool for taking screenshots called `Grab’. From the `Capture’ menu, select the type of screenshot. It waits ten seconds and then captures your screen. Follow the prompts to select the area of your screen capture and go to `File’ menu and then `Save’ the screenshot as a TIFF image