How To Take A Screen Shot In Windows XP

1. Press Print Screen to capture the entire screen, or Alt+Print Screen, to capture only the active window.

2. Open the Run window (Win key+R), type in mspaint, and then press Enter, or choose the old way – Start> All Programs> Accessories> Paint.

3. Once Paint opens, simply press Ctrl+V to paste the contents of the clipboard (your screen shot, obviously); the old way is to open the Edit menu and click on Paste.

4. Press Ctrl+S and choose the destination where you want to save the screen shot. Beware that default image format is BMP, and the resulting file can be pretty large, so be sure to save as JPEG, GIF, or PNG (TIFF files are also pretty large).

In Windows Vista Home Basic, you’ll be doing about the same thing, and no matter what Windows OS do you have, there are plenty of free image capture tools to play with, for example the one coming with PhotoScape.

How To Take A Screen Shot In Windows Vista

If you don’t have Vista Home Basic, then your version surely has the Snipping Tool, so here’s how to use that one…

1. Open the Snipping Tool simply by typing snip in the Search Box and clicking on its name, once it appears (if you have similar programs, for example a game called Sniper, those will also be shown).

2. Click the arrow pointing down in the right side of the New button to choose the selection mode (free-form, rectangular, window and full screen capture modes are available).

3. Select the area you want to capture, and then work on your image, if you consider it necessary.

4. When everything’s done, save your work (PNG, GIF, JPEG and MHT files can be saved by Vista’s Snipping Tool) or send it through email right away!

How To Take A Screen Shot In Mac OS X, Linux, or any other OS

If you’re using anything but Windows, things should be about the same. After all, the Print Screen key also works in Linux and Mac OS X… and I am sure that if you’re using anything but Windows, most chances are that you know how to take a screen shot already, right?

These being said, I only have one question remaining: how do you take screen shots?

Now, considering all the above, wouldn’t be great to have an AIO file with those “must have” Windows updates? As long as it gets the job done, I don’t mind if it has a Chinese interface… but, fortunately, All in One Runtimes only seems to come in German. Trust me – you don’t have to know a single German word to use this updates package successfully – all you need is about 500 MB of free space on your Windows drive (or the temporary drive, if you messed with the Windows settings and set some folder on another partition to be used for storing temporary files) and 7-Zip to unpack the downloadable package you have chosen.

To make the last phrase of the previous paragraph clear as Bora Bora’s water, let me tell you there are two All in One Runtimes packages available, one for Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 x86, and one for Windows x64, including Windows 7.

The thing that makes All in One Runtimes worth downloading is the .NET Framework and all those countless hotfixes I was telling you about earlier, but there’s even more to this AIO package, since you’ll also get the latest DirectX 9.0c, Adobe Flash Player 10, Shockwave Player 11.5.0.596, Java Runtime Environment 6, Visual C++ Runtimes, an even Microsoft Silverlight 3.0! Installing them is as easy as possible; in fact, you can only unpack the executable package, and then do nothing! Go out and have a beer, then get back to your updated Windows OS – how cool’s that?

Finally, I should thank Raymond for discovering this software treasure. I really enjoy discovering things on my own, but this time I must give credits to the man, so… Thank you very much, Raymond!

Anyway, I am sure we can find a lot of examples about those times when your lockable keys were exactly in the wrong status, and I think this would also be a great subject for you to talk about, so please go ahead and tell us about funny (or not so funny) happenings involving Caps Lock, Scroll Lock or Num Lock, will you?

OK, back to disabling keys now… NumLocker is the name of the program, and the current version is 1.0. I don’t think any update is needed, because this little freebie offers exactly what you need – a quick way to disable/enable those three keys I mentioned earlier and make them remain set the way you want!

After you install the program, you’ll have to load it and right click its systray icon. Once you do that, everything should be pretty straightforward – for each key, you can choose one of the following options: On, Off, Always On, and Always Off. Other than that, you can also choose to load NumLocker with Windows, so you won’t have to bother about setting the program ever again!

Apart from being free to download and use, there’s also worth mentioning the fact that NumLocker works with both XP and Vista, and installing/removing it is as easy as 1-2-3. That’s it, folks, I really hope you’ll enjoy today’s tip and find this proggie to be a worthy addition to your software arsenal…

- The file is located in the %SystemRoot%\System32 folder, while viruses that don’t replace the original usually use the Windows root folder or some other system folder, like %SystemRoot%\system, and sometimes right in the %SystemRoot%\ folder.

- If you notice that svchost.exe is taking up too much processor time, you can try to find the service responsible for it and kill the process; anyway, it would also come handy to search for more info on Google, first of all!

- While using (ex-)Sysinternals Process Explorer is a very good way to find your path around svchost.exe in Windows XP, Vista’s improved Task Manager gives you a lot of power, so be sure to check “Show processes from all users,” and then right click one svchost instance, followed by a left click on Go To Service(s).

- There will always be more instances of svchost.exe running, so don’t worry; the number depends on the services running on your computer.

I guess there could be said a lot more about svchost.exe, but this isn’t a detailed svchost guide. What I wanted to do is just scratch the surface and help you open your eyes. If you have any questions about svchost.exe, don’t hesitate to drop your comments below and ask them, because it would be a real pleasure to help you find your answers!

This trick works in both Windows XP and Vista, could also work in other Windows versions, but I didn’t have the chance to try it. Anyway, here it goes…

1. Open the command prompt window (just go to Start>Run and type in cmd, then press Enter)

2. Type tasklist at the command prompt and press Enter; note the info available about each process – Image Name, PID, Session Name, Session#, and Mem Usage

3. If you want to kill a process, you will need to know its Image Name or PID

4. For example, if I want to kill my foobar2000 player, I should type “taskkill /PID 4916 /F” or “taskkill /IM foobar2000.exe /F” (without the quotation marks, of course)

5. Once the process has been killed, you should get a message saying “SUCCESS: The process with PID x has been terminated.” or “SUCCESS: The process “name” with PID x has been terminated.”

That’s all, folks… but don’t let yourself be fooled by the short guide above – there’s much more to be done with the “taskkill” command. To get extensive info about the available parameters (the two possible uses described above are only the tip of the iceberg, you know…), just type “taskkill /?” at the command prompt and be amazed by this terrible hidden weapon available to Windows power users!

First of all, be sure that you won’t need to connect to a Windows 95/98/Me computer and find the scheduled tasks and printers installed on it. Anyway, if you still find some computer running those operating systems, let me know! I really have a weakness for completely outdated hardware and software…

Deleting the two registry keys I’ll mention here should speed up browsing any remote computer, including Windows XP ones. Since I don’t have a network to play with at home, I can’t tell you anything about the improvement, but I am sure you will drop a comment below to enlighten us, right?

1. Open the Registry Editor (Start>Run, type regedit, press Enter)
2. Move to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RemoteComputer\NameSpace
3. In the left pane, look for {D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF} and {2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}; deleting the first one disables scheduled task checking, while removing the second one will disable printer checking. Just be sure to backup them before anything else, just in case…
4. Close the Registry Editor and restart your computer to allow the changes to take effect.

One last thing – if any of the keys is missing, don’t worry! Delete the one available, and that’s it. For example, the first one wasn’t available on my computer, and I think I even know why – I used some tweaking tool some time ago, and probably I disabled everything related to the Windows Tasks Scheduler.

That’s it, folks! Please don’t forget to drop your comments below, all right? Some results of network browsing performance tests would really be nice, so thanks in advance!

If you ever had to setup more than one computer, you probably know already that the inexperienced Windows user never listens to others’ advice, and today we’ll attack a little part of this very large problem…

Anyway, I am sure you’ve seen a lot of computers with at least a few dozen icons laying on the desktop, and the owners of those computers complaining about the poor performance of the computer, the weather, the crisis, and so on. While I can’t do anything to solve the other problems, here’s what I do to keep things in order and get the best out of my computer – I disable the desktop icons!

If I recall it well, there’s a chance to do that by manually editing the Windows registry, but why bother when I have a script for you that can help you do that? Just download this arhive, unpack the file inside it, double click that file, and choose to continue when asked. Don’t worry, because if you don’t like your new clean desktop, you can easily run it again, and enable desktop icons once again.

I’ve been doing this for years, and I must confess it’s one of the most well hidden Windows secrets, especially because most Windows XP books and guides don’t mention it, for some dark reason.

All that you need to remember is that, if you fight your own old habits and learn how to use Windows XP with a file manager and no desktop icons, you will come back here one day and thank me, because time is the most valuable asset we have, and instead of waiting for Windows XP to refresh its icons cache and reload all those 5436 icons lying on your desktop, you could be enjoying some quality time with the ones you love… or earn some more money!

One last thing – since Windows Vista is more flexible, you can easily remove all icons from its desktop, so there’s no need for this trick on the computers running it. On the other hand, I don’t think it works in Vista. Anyway, Windows XP still has some years ahead, and I still believe it’s the best Windows OS for the average Joe, as well as power users who want to get the job done, and not enjoy some 3D flipping windows and shiny, rounded corners…