Windows has always featured some kind of basic screen grabbing tool, from the incredibly primitive Print Screen key that copies the entire screen to the clipboard to the Snipping Tool of Vista and Windows 7, which enables you to grab selected parts of the screen or active windows, with or without the mouse cursor.

For most people this may be enough, but if you’re after a professional solution that supports a wider range of features and options, then WinSnap has to be a serious contender. It’s small and unobtrusive, but gives you complete control over the screen or portion of the screen you’re grabbing, including options for window, region, application (enabling you to capture two or three open windows from the same application without grabbing the background) and object, which gives you complete control over which screen elements to include with a handy Ctrl-click selection.

Its major selling point is its support for the Aero background, plus there are some handy post-production effects: add shadows, reflections and highlights, rotate your image,watermark your screen captures, insert your own background and create thumbnails.

WinSnap is also the perfect example of a good shareware tool: a low price (US$24.95) that entitles you to a lifetime of updates, which come quickly in response to many user requests - the latest version (4.5) is a good example of this, introducing a user-defined delay on screen captures along with countdown clock. You can also install it on as many computers as you own.