Free tools to generate screenshots

If you are not satisfied with the kind of screenshots you can generate with the PrintScreen button & MS Paint, you should evaluate these free tools that offer you a lot more options -

• Cropper is a lightweight screen capture utility written in C# with a lot of nifty features. It is available from Codeplex and the download size is 270KB. You can not just save the screenshots in JPG, PNG formats but also as Animated Gif & AVI using Cropper plugins.
• Snipping Tool which comes with Windows Vista is accessible from the Accessories section. With this you can "snip" a full-screen window or a particular window or extract portions in a rectangular or free-form format and save it as a GIF, JPG, PNG or HTML file. It also allows you to do other simple manipulations to the image like highlighting & writing on it.
• Paint.NET is a free image and photo editing software that has been drawing rave reviews. You can do more complicated manipulations to your screenshot with this. The downloadable executable in compressed format is 1.53MB.

Also see - Windows Developer Power Tools - Most Loved