How to take screenshots of your great wins!

Screenshots are a great way to record your great wins (or diabolical bad luck) especially good for slots, as you will have seen on various pages on this site. This is a basic guide of how to make & save them, based on using the Windows operating system. (I’m using XP Home, but other versions should be roughly the same).

Somewhere at the top right of your keyboard you should have a ‘Prt Scr’ (Print Screen) button. To create your basic shot, just press this button – this will capture everything on your whole screen.
To capture only the active window, hold down the right-hand ‘Alt’ key before pressing Prt Scr.

(If using a MS Multimedia keyboard, make sure the F-lock is off first!)

1. Capture whole screen:

2. Capture active window only:

Next, open MS Paint and click on ‘Edit’ then ‘Paste’. This will reproduce your shot.
You can then save it onto your hard drive by using “File“, “Save as” (I suggest you create a special folder for your shots – I have a different one for each software type).
NOTE: When you save, Paint automatically defaults to “Bitmap” format which creates a very large file on your disk (photo quality). To save space, save as “Jpeg”. With my example shot used below Bitmap was 1.544MB, but Jpeg was only 0.156MB. The quality is only slightly less.
You can see how big your file is by clicking “Image”, “Attributes”

4. Save as type

6. Check your file size

If you want to upload your shot onto a website such as CasinoMeister (to show off!) you need to make sure it is small enough to be accepted. E.g. at CM max is 640x480 pixels & 195KB
Change the size by clicking “Image”, “Stretch/Skew” and change the Horizontal & Vertical % - normally about 70-80% is OK. Check the size again afterwards, as in (6) above.* Don’t forget to save your file again after re-sizing!
When you write your post, scroll down & look for “Manage Attachments”. Then click “Browse” and locate the shot on your computer. Finally click “Upload” (the software will tell you if the file is too big), wait until it’s done and click “Close window” to finish.

8. Change size

9. Upload to forums

* Tip: When changing the size you may end up with a badly distorted/blurred image. If you have Excel97 paste your original onto a spreadsheet, right click & reduce size, then copy & paste into Paint as above. With later versions of Excel or Word (2003+) this doesn’t work, but you could try reducing the size on your document & then taking a new screenshot…?

If I’ve missed anything, or you need more help – just e-mail me!

Looking forward to seeing your shots on the net!

Here’s my all-time favourite (so far…)!