TS2 + Win7 = No PrintScreen

[Liz]

Having just been forcibly upgraded to Windows 7 and reinstalling TS2, I'm unable to use PrintScreen to take a screen capture to paste into Pshop or Paint. What ends up pasted instead is a shot of the desktop itself.

Searching the web, it seems the suggested solution for this is to run the game in windowed mode. I really don't want to play windowed, but it seems I don't have the option anyway. The usual "-w" at the end of the shortcut path now returns a "Hey, that's not the path!" error in Windows 7. It will not accept the change.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a PrintScreen method that works in Win7? Or barring that, a way to get windowed mode to work so that I can at least take these pics for now?

[J. M. Pescado]

Put it outside the quotes?

[Moonshires]

If you're using printscreen (or were), I'm assuming you don't care about the GUI being in the shot.  If that's the case, you could download FRAPs and assign your printscreen key as the default picture taking key.  It'll save the image in the FRAPs folder.

You can download it at http://www.fraps.com/.

[Liz]

I was trying it outside the quotes (it's just quoted above for grammerz), but Win7 still insisted it knew better than I and refused to accept the change.

I'll take a peek at FRAPs, thanks. I'd prefer being able to copy it to the clipboard and just plonk it into Photoshop from there, but that sounds better than the wad of nothing I'm getting now.

[novelty]

A quick google search recommends trying alt+printscreen for desktops.  This allegedly captures the active window.  For lappys fn+printscreen or fn+alt+printscreen.

For the command line switches from a shortcut try creating your own shortcut on the desktop.  Running the shortcut from the default 'games' folder may be the problem.

I have not tested either of these solutions so it may or may not work.

[simsrocks]

I had the same problem with not being able to get printscreens of Sims, I'll try that.

EDIT: Doesn't work :/ I tried both, still getting desktop.

[Liz]

novelty, thanks for the suggestions; unfortunately, I'd already tried them, having worn out whatever google-fu I possess before posting this. Alt+PrntScrn didn't do it, nor did Ctrl+Alt+PrntScrn, and the shortcut is always my own on the desktop. Win7 just insists I'm 'shrooming when I try to add the -w for "windowed mode" at the end of it. Since I don't use a laptop, I don't know if the Fn key solutions work or not.

The reason I've been trying to run it in windowed mode is precisely because of that phrase "active window" in the Alt+PrntScrn recommendation. I figured that since it wasn't capturing full-screen game shots (I tried in another game, just to rule out the possibility that it was something about my TS2 configuration that it didn't like), it might cooperate if the game were in an actual window. Unfortunately, that's also proving to be a challenge to accomplish. If it were capping other games, I'd be willing to entertain the wacky notion that it's something about my shortcut leading to the noCD instead of the "proper" .exe, but running from that infectious .exe wouldn't be an option anyway.

FRAPs is proving, so far, to be an acceptable work-around for the specific shots I'm taking right now, so thanks for the link, Moonshires. I'm still hunting, though, for that elusive way to cap and drop directly into Photoshop without having to use windowed mode (not that I can get that to work anyway), but I'm wondering if it's just not doable yet in Win7.

[Solowren]

Using -w works fine for me in Windows 7. I also use FRAPS--I like that it just plonks the screenie into a folder without me needing to paste it into Paint and then save it to the same place, anyway.