Every once in awhile, it’s nice to capture an image of something on your computer screen, save it as a file and email it off to someone. I frequently have my mom do this when trying to figure out a particular error she is receiving on her computer. When the error appears on her screen, I have her take a screen print, save it as a file and send it to me via email so I can take a look.

The great thing about this capability is anyone that has Windows XP can do it. All you have to do is press Alt+Print Screen (the Print Screen button is usually just to the right of the F12 button on a standard keyboard). Strangely, you won’t get any indication that anything has happened when you do this.

But the image has temporarily been stored on a virtual clipboard. Now we just need to paste that image into a program and save it as a file.

There are many applications out there one can use to paste the image into, but I just tell my mom to use Paint. It’s a simple little image editing program that comes with Windows XP and it’s perfect for this sort of thing. To open Paint, click Start => All Programs => Accessories => Paint. Next, select the Edit option at the top and click on Paste (or ALT-V will paste the image as well). You should now see the image you captured. To save the file, click File => Save As … and in the drop-down menu that says “Save As Type”, choose JPEG. Pick any file name you want and click the Save button.