I love, love, love the Snippy Tool in Windows 7 and Vista. It gives you much smaller files than doing a screen shot with the “prt sc” button on the computer. When I have folks email me a screen shot, the file is often a couple MBs in size when using the traditional print screen. However, if you use the Snippy Tool you can usually get a good resolution of a screen shot with a files size of less than 100 K. Needless to say, it makes for a much smaller file!

However, XP does not have a built-in Snippy Tool and there are still a lot of XP users out there… but a bit of googling found a great alternative. You can get the download and directions for this Snippy Tool here.

Basically you download a file called snippy.exe. You can save it on the desktop, then double click it to put it in the system tray. Right click on this icon and choose settings to adjust them to your preferences. To capture an image, right click on the icon, choose capture, and your cursor will turn into a pencil. Select your image and then click on the tool again and choose “Save As…”

Hope this works as well for you as it does for me. Here’s a picture of the icon….

NOTE: This also works well on Server 20xx since the newer servers do not have Snippy Tool without the Desktop Experience.