Free Screen Capture Tools for Windows

Free tools for capturing screen shots in Windows. Most of these offer extended features beyond the standard print screen key capture built in to Windows.
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13 Articles in: Free Screen Capture Tools for Windows
Capture and Save a Screen Shot in Windows XP
[Video Tutorial] See how to capture and save a screenshot in Windows XP.
Windows Vista Snipping Tool - © S. Chastain
Use the Windows Snipping Tool to Grab Screenshots
Microsoft includes a snipping tool in Windows Vista and later Windows versions to make capturing screenshots easier. Here's how to find and use it.
PrtScn Key on the Keyboard - © Liz Masoner, used with permission
How to Take a Sceenshot on Windows
Learn how to capture a screen shot of your desktop or an active window to save as an image in Microsoft Windows.
AnalogX Capture (Win)
Capture the entire screen or a single window at any color depth and resolution. A left click the program's icon in the system tray will automatically capture and save a bitmap file to your capture directory. Freeware.
Capture Express (Win)
This free advertiser-supported screen capture tool for Windows features alignment correction, capture shapes, borders, and supports Bitmap, GIF and JPEG formats. Cost to remove ads is $15 US.
CaptureEze (Win)

Screen capture with support for scanners and digital cameras, available in Professional, Standard, 16-bit, and DOS versions.

FastStone Capture (Win)
"FastStone Capture (FSCapture) is a free image viewer, editor and screen capture.It supports all major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA."
MWSnap (Win)
MWSnap is a small yet powerful Windows program for snapping (capturing) images from selected parts of the screen... handles 5 most popular graphics formats and contains several graphical tools: a zoom, a ruler, a color picker and a window spy. It can be also used as a fast picture viewer or converter." Freeware
Cropper (Win)
"Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C# on the Microsoft .Net platform. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. The files are saved straight to a folder of your choice in the format you specify or to the clipboard or printer." Freeware.
ScreenGrab (Win)
"ScreenGrab is a simple, yet effective screen capture utility for Windows. When running, ScreenGrab responds to preset hotkey combinations, making it easy to make screen captures without having to click on buttons or use the mouse." Freeware.
Snippy (Windows)
"How often have you carefully selected some text from a Web page and copied it to an email message? Snippy makes this a snap! Simply click on the little Snippy icon in the taskbar notification area, and mark out the region of the screen that you want to copy %u2014 that's it, you're done!"
SWBCapture (Win)
Captures images of any window or the entire desktop via drag and drop. Save the images to the clipboard, to a named file, or autosave to the directory of your choice. Supports BMP, JPEG, and GIF formats. Freeware.
Window Clippings (Win)
"Free screen capture utility for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista."
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