I’ve been creating application documentation lately, and FastStone Capture has been a big help. Previously, I used alt-PrtScn to send a screen capture of the active window to the clipboard, and then pasted it into Paint Shop Pro to edit and crop as necessary. FastStone Capture is more flexible about what part of the screen it captures (even capturing scrolling windows), and then it sends the capture immediately to an editor that lets you easily crop and save. It even comes up with a date-based filename.

It’s free–check it out! Apparently not free anymore, but still a great tool (October 5, 2007)

Free tools that people have told me about (January, 2009):

• IrfanView – I haven’t actually seen the capture capability yet
• Super Screen capture
• Vista has a built-in snip tool.? You might need to install the tablet tools to get it.
• mwsnap
• Screen Grab Pro

It can be a struggle to figure out where all the space has gone on your hard drives. This is a handle little utility that adds a “size” tab to the properties page of Windows Explorer. Just right-click on a folder, choose Properties, click the Size tab, and you’ll see how much space is taken up by each of your folders and its subfolders and files. Use the Options button to sort by size.

This is not as pretty as the graphical output that you get from a utility like TreeSize, but it’s nice that it’s integrated with Windows Explorer.

This utility can be found at many file download sites, including here.

It’s been a while since I looked for a good, free file zipper and unzipper for Windows.

If you need one, check out IZArc. It handles all of the file types that I ever need to work with. Here’s the feature list from the web site–check it out!

• Create an archive
• Add files to an existing archive
• Delete files from an existing archive
• Extract files from an existing archive
• Test an archive file
• Convert archive
• Convert CD Images
• Repair broken archive
• Searching for any files in many archives
• Favorite Folders
• Obtaining a detailed list of files and information like compression rate, path, or size from an archive file
• Supports both long and short 8.3 filenames
• Disk spanning from and to multiple diskettes or other removable media
• Implementing the possibility to sort the list items by name size, date and etc.
• Full Drag & Drop support
• CD/DVD Images support (ISO, BIN, MDF, NRG, IMG, C2D, PDI, CDI)
• Integrating in Windows Explorer context menu
• Automatic installation of most software distributed in archive files
• Add/View comments in an archive
• By double-clicking onto a file in the file list, it’s opened with the program associated to this file type
• CheckOut feature
• Create a self-extracting archive
• E-mail an archive
• Checking for new updates
• Built-in multilanguage support
• Virus Scan feature
• UU/XX/MIME Encode/Decode
• Create Multi-Volume Set
• Merge Multi-Volume Set
• UnSFX (Convert self-extracting (SFX) .EXE files to standard archives)
• Encrypt files using Rijandael – AES (256-bits) encryption
• Zip encryption (WinZip 9 compatible)
• BZip compression for ZIP archives
• Decrypt (.ize) files