Screen captures are useful for various reasons. You can use them to highlight a certain aspect of a program to friends, make presentations or explain a technical problem you’re having. At Softonic, we usually use SnagIt to take screenshots but MWSnap does the job equally as well and best of all, it’s completely free.

MWSnap is a small but powerful screen capture program capable of taking whole desktop shots, a highlighted window, an active menu or a fixed or free rectangular part of the screen. It can save images in all of the major image formats (JPG, BMP, TIFF, PNG and GIF) and also includes a zoom, a ruler and a colour picker. However, one of the most useful features specific to MWSnap is the autosave feature. This is brilliant for when you are filling in forms online and need to keep the details safe – just one click and it’s all saved automatically. MWSnap seems to be able to capture just about anything too – any size, shape or form. If something on the screen is too small you can always magnify it and capture it that way.

On the downside, the selection of hotkeys is limited. For example, you can’t just simply assign the PrtScn key to save screenshots. You have to use a combination of Shift, Ctrl, Alt and the function keys to take screenshots without the mouse. It could also do with a few more editing features such as the snazzy faded and jagged edge effects available in SnagIt. Some users also find that memory usage shoots up when taking captures which can make your system unstable although we didn’t experience this.

All in all, this an excellent free screen capture tool although if you’re looking for advanced editing features, you’d be better with SnagIt or FastStone Capture.