Capture a screen shot, and send it to someone via email

This tip is one of the BEST things, and one I have been using for years.

It has many uses, but a great one is to send a screenshot of a "mysterious window" that has popped up on your screen to a friend for analysis.

Let's say you have just noticed a little yellow shield in the system tray (bottom right of screen, to the right end of the task bar just before the clock). When you hover your mouse over it (or indeed any of the icons in the system tray), a little yellow "tool-tip" message is displayed. It says:

Updates are ready for your computer. Click here to install these updates.

Well, that sounds like something you should do, so you click on the shield, and this window pops up:

Well, you wonder what you should do, and you would love to be able to SEND a copy of that window to a friend who could then see the window you are talking about and advise you.

Piece of cake! Here's how to do that.

It's really a two step process, just a variation on the old "Copy and Paste"

Step 1. First, you copy the active window to the Clipboard. Here's how:

1. Make sure your window is "active" (the title bar at the top of the window should be blue, not greyed out)
2. On your keyboard, press Alt-PrintScr (hold the Alt key down and strike the Print Screen key)

Now, the image of that window has been captured and is sitting in your Clipboard.

Step 2. Paste the image from the Clipboard into the body area of an email message addressed to your friend. Here's how:

1. Open your email program, and go into compose (write a message) mode.
2. Address the message to your friend on the To: line as usual.
3. In the subject line, type something like "Question for you"
4. Click into the body area, press the enter key a couple of times to leave room for you to type your question later.
5. Do your paste, either by pressing Ctrl-V or using your favourite way of pasting into an email message. The image of the window that you captured earlier will appear.
6. Now, click back at top of the body area, above the image, and type your question to your friend. Just send the message off, and your friend will be able to see the very window that you are asking him/her about.

========================================================================

NOTE: Once you have captured a window using Alt-PrintScr, you can paste it into other applications, such as a Wordperfect or Word document.