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I am running Vista and I have Virtual PC 2007 with a VM running XP. When I try to capture the screen with Alt+PrintScreen I get nothing. When I use PrintScreen I get a screenshot of the entire screen, but it takes extra time to crop all the images. Is there a way to get the Alt+Printscreen function to work inside a VM that is running Windows XP ?

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2 Answers

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I am guessing that you are selecting the Window and then your Alt+Print Screen is getting captured in the guest.

You have two options...

  1. Go to the guest and press print screen, save and then transfer to the host.

  2. Try looking within the Virtual Machine settings for the unhook / release hotkey (I think it is either Ctrl+Alt or Right Alt. Select the Virtual Machine so you can move inside it, then press the release key so the Virtual Machine software still has focus, but your keyboard/mouse is not captured, then press the Alt+Print Screen combination and it should capture a screen shot on the host.

Failing this, it may be easier to either to just do print screen as normal and crop it or use a third party screen grabbing software (Just Googled and that one with the link looks ok, but I recommend you do aa bit of research yourself if you want to go down this route).

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The host key was Right Alt. I thought you were on to something because I was trying to capture a screen shot out of habbit by using Right Alt and PrintScreen. But even after trying to use the other Alt key, and changing the host key it still didn't work. It doesn't seem like this should be this hard. – Bob Dec 2 '09 at 3:15
Did you press the release key, confirm it was released, the press the other alt + printscreen? You should release first then do it, It should work... a bit confused if it doesn't - I will test here if you confirm you tried with no luck... It sounded like from your message you just pressed right alt and print screen. Did I understand you wrong? – William Hilsum Dec 2 '09 at 3:29
OK, I get it now. It was actually working. The mistake I was making was I am trying to capture a window inside MS Access and it will only go down to the outer window MS Access level. I thought I was able to capture single forms, but I must be mistaken. Thanks for the help. – Bob Dec 2 '09 at 3:39
up vote 0 down vote

The correct way is actually given here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee449428(v=ws.10).aspx

CTRL+ALT+ +

CTRL+ALT+-

or CTRL+ALT+PRINTSCREEN

Depending on what version you have.

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