There are dozens of “screen capture” tools on the web, and some of the best are free. I like FastStone Capture myself. It sits in the systray with the cutest icon I’ve seen in a long time, ready to provide selection, saving to various formats, printing, viewing, basic editing, and all sorts of other stuff you didn’t know you needed. There are many others. Google here to find all you want.

However, if you already have an image editor you like, and just want to do a quick capture, Windows XP already has the capability built in. Just poke the “PrtScrn” key, open your editor, and paste the screen image in from the clipboard, where XP will have thoughtfully saved it as a bitmap. You can then save it as a bmp, .jpeg, .jpeg2000, .gif, .png, .pcx, .tif, .wmf, .ico, tga or whatever, and edit it as you please.

Oh…your editor won’t save to all those formats? FastStone Capture will.