Windows comes with two ways to capture screenshots baked into the software. If you hit PrintScreen it will capture the entire screen to the clipboard. If you hit Alt-PrintScreen it will capture the active application/window to the clipboard.

I very rarely use the full screen capture because I’m usually taking a shot of one specific application. This process is very easy to understand, and simple to use. It’s at this point where my frustration begins.

With the baked-in functionality Windows places the screenshots in the clipboard. You’ve captured it, but now you have to do something with it, which is completely un-intuitive. In OS X when you take a screenshot it dumps the image not to the clipboard, but saves it as a PNG to your desktop. It even makes a camera clicking sound so you know it took the picture.

What I generally do on Windows is open Paint.net and paste the capture into a new image. I will frequently get screenshots pasted into Word documents. Neither way is convenient for the one capturing the image, and the Word method is not convenient for the viewer.

Since it doesn’t happen baked-in, are there any installable products that are capable of duplicating the simplicity of the OS X screenshot process on Windows? Or does everyone just suffer with the standard functionality?