Taking screenshots can be an important thing to do. It might be that you are blogging, trying to show someone something or even there’s an image that you want to save.

Taking screen shots is not an as easy as you think. In XP and Vista, there is not a one click button that takes a screen shot. You then have to somehow save it. So here is a quick tutorial on how to take a screenshot.

In Vista

There is a nice nifty program in Windows Vista that can take screenshots quite easily. All you have to do is search for Snipping Tool in the Vista start menu search. Or you can find it under all programs –> accessories.

Once you have opened it, you will be presented with a box that looks like this.

Just click on New, and what ever you want to take an image around, click and drag the box around it.

If you want, you can can then draw or highlight on the image before you can save it. Once you save the image, you have successfully created a screen shot.

XP and Vista

The other way you can create screenshots in Vista and in XP is to press the Prt Scr button on your keyboard. This captures everything that is on your screen. If you press the alt key and the Prt Scr key at the same time, you will only capture the open window. (The open window is the window that is currently active)

Then you have to open up Microsoft Paint which can be found in the same location, and the same way as Snipping Tool can be found.

Once in Paint, press control and the letter v to paste the image into Paint. Then you can save the image. Remember to save the image as a JPEG, GIF or PNG for best results and not a BMP since they are very large.

If you only want a certain part of the image, you can follow the below steps.

1. Crop the image that you want using the tool that looks like a rectangle.

2. Copy the image by pressing control and ‘c’, open up a new paint document by going to File –> new.

3. Paste the image by pressing control and the letter ‘v’ on the keyboard.

4. If there is a lot of white space, you can click on a little blue dot in the bottom right and corner and resize the image. Make sure you first deselect the image before you try to resize the picture area.

Once you are done, you can choose File –> save and save your image.