Taking a screengrab of your desktop is fairly easy and straightforward if you simply want to grab the whole screen, using the 'Print Screen' key on your keyboard.

However, if you have a non-standard keyboard without this function, or simply want to grab a particular area of the screen (or an active window), you'll need to resort to a software alternative.

FastStone Screen Capture is a powerful, flexible and intuitive screen-capture utility. It enables you to capture anything on the screen including windows, objects, full screen, rectangle regions, freehand-selected regions and scrolling windows/web pages.

It has innovative features such as a floating capture panel, hotkeys, resizing, cropping, text annotation, printing, the facility to email your grab and much more.