The Snipping Tool in Windows Vista.
Before Windows Vista, if you wanted a screen shot you had to use the less than intuitive method of
pressing the print screen key and pasting the screen shot into a graphics program to add markup and save it. With Windows Vista, Microsoft has included a utility called the Snipping Tool to make capturing screen shots easier.
• Capture a Screen Shot with the Snipping Tool in Windows Vista
Also see:
• What is a Screen Shot?
• Capture a Screen Shot with Mac OS X
• Capture a Screen Shot with XnView
• Capture a Screen Shot with Windows (any version)
• More Tools & Tips for Taking Screen Shots
This reminds of something I encountered a few weeks ago. I’d used the snipping tool many times and had written about it but one day I went to use it and it wasn’t there. A quick google search turned up the reason. At some point I’d uninstalled some tablet pc software that comes with Vista. The snipping tool is a component of that little bundle (why? I have no idea). So if you can’t find the snipping tool in Vista, it may be that you need to activate those tablet pc settings (provided you have a version of Vista other than Home Basic). Here’s one of the many posts online that describe how to get your snipping tool back:
http://www.technipages.com/vista-snipping-tool-is-missing.html