Unlike the ages old Printscreen button on the keyboard that takes a screenshot of your entire screen, there's a more complex tool hidden within the bowels of every version of Windows Vista except Home Basic. Known as the snipping tool, it was originally found in an add-on pack for XP Tablet Edition 2005, to make using a stylus easier. Now mouse users on Vista can reap the benefits too.
Just open the Start menu, type snip and hit enter to load the tool. You can now specify whether you want to take a screenshot of a free-form area, a rectangular one, isolate a window or take a screenshot of the entire screen. After you've used the mouse to highlight the area you want, you can draw on the screenshot to add notes, and then save it as you would a normal file.
You can create a keyboard shortcut to it in two ways. For the first, right-click on the application, choose Properties, select the Shortcut tab and in the Shortcut key field click, and enter any alphanumeric key. By default Windows assigns a CTRL + ALT in front of the shortcut, however, we've found this often doesn't work — try holding down SHIFT while pressing a key, to make the key combination CTRL + SHIFT + [whatever key you pressed]. You might create a shortcut here that will clash with existing ones, so be careful.
By far the easier way is to simply CTRL + drag the Snipping Tool shortcut into your Quick Launch bar, effectively copying it there. Now you can access it by pressing + whatever number Quick Launch button it is (for example, if it was the first in the row, you'd press + 1).
