Maybe you don't need external software if you want to create a screen shot, here are some easy steps you can follow:
- When you are sure you want to take a picture about the current case, press the Prt Scr (aka. Print Screen) button on your keyboard.
- Once the screen is saved, you need to load the picture into an application, let's use the good old Paint program:
- Start
- Run...
- mspaint
- Hit Enter or click OK
- Now you'll need to Paste the screen shot into the application: you can either use the menu just press Ctrl+V buttons
Usually, we don't need colors, so you can create much smaller images - in size. Also, you can resize&crop or crop the picture, so you can cut out all unnecessary parts: to resize&crop in the same time, first drag the picture and align it to the left and up, so you've just cut the unnecessary parts from the left/up. Now you need to go to the bottom-right corner of the picture and click the corner point: drag it upwards, to the left (you'll cut the unnecessary right and bottom parts).
I suggest you to save your picture in JPG format, it is an already compressed picture format which got small size, and avoid using BMP format (uncompressed, bigest size).
BSOD:
IF the minidump creation is enabled, you can find your .dmp files at C:\Windows\minidump (C:\Windows\ equals with your system path). Let's check it:
1. Start
2. Run...
3. sysdm.cpl (click OK)
4. Special tab
5. Check startup and recovery
At least the 64KB file is needed, so check it from the drop-down list. If automatic restart is checked, i suggest a clear (so you can read asap what happened /if you can't log in next time, this is quite useful/).
Wanna see what was the text of the BSOD? I'd get the freeware
BlueScreenView from Nirsoft. Use Options|Advanced Options to specify non-default paths and Options|Lower Pane Mode to switch View.