JDPFu.com 2025

Every once in a while, I need to create instructions that someone else can follow. A few screen shots would be very helpful. Windows7 includes a program called psr that captures the entire desktop and describes which mouse clicks were entered as they happen. Every mouse click captures another screen shot. Very handy for creating a step-by-step instruction document or to help recreate steps to cause a problem. When you stop recording, it packages the file(s) into a ZIP ready to share.

This can also be used to report bugs, since it captures widget clicks too and adds the description of them into a web page along with the screen captures.

I can also report that it captures virtual machine screen shots and clicks too, but not for internal to the processes. It just knows that you clicked on something inside the VM.

To run this tool,

Start —> Run —> psr

It may work in Vista and there may be a download for older systems like WinXP, but I can’t confirm that.

The other downside to this tool is that it creates MHTML (mht) files, which don’t display without coaxing except with IE. Opera Browser will display the resulting files, but Firefox 3.5.x refused to open it.