Making Screenshots

For the Techtalkers to more efficiently solve your problem, it's essential that complete information is given. The best way for this to happen can often be by providing a screenshot or two of what the problem looks like or any error messages that pop up.

There are several ways of generating a screen-shot. These are two of the the most straightforward methods.

If you don't have an image editor:
Download (1.3MB), unzip and install FastStone Capture from www.faststone.org. Make sure you have the program or window that you want to capture open, then start Faststone Capture and click the Capture Active Window button (far left) or just press Shift+PrintScreen.

Faststone Capture will open your screen capture in its own editor. You can then crop and/or resize before saving it as a PNG.

If you already have an image editing program:
To capture the screen, press the print screen button once (it won't make a noise or provide you with an alert at all, so don't think that nothing happened). This will capture the entire screen. If you want to limit the screen-capture area to just a single window, hold down ALT while you press the Print Screen button.

Open your favourite graphics program.

Create a new picture and paste the screen capture into it (Ctrl-V). It is possible that the image will be quite large, so it might require cropping to make it more reasonably sized and remove everything that isn't relevant. 200-300 KB is reasonable. Less is better.

Save it as a PNG.

Uploading Your Screen Capture
Now you have a screen capture. The tricky thing is getting it online so that everyone can see it. There are several free image hosting sites available. Flickr, Photo Bucket and ImageShack are all reliable, easy to use sites. TinyPic is also good to use for once off image posts, you dont need to register, just select graphic and click upload.

Find the picture's URL and post that on TechTalk.