A lot of people ask me about how to OSX print screen (i.e take a screen grab in OS X) and also how to take a print screen in Windows XP/Vista. I know this has been covered before but I thought I would put up a little post up….

OS X Print Screen

In OSX you press [and hold] the apple command key, hold shift and then press either 3 or 4 (what does the command key look like?… click here). Here are the most commonly used options:

Capture Entire Screen: Command + Shift + 3

Capture Selected Area: Command + Shift + 4;  then click [hold] and drag a box around the area you wish to capture. Once you release the mouse button the image will be captured.

Using the above key combinations will cause OSX to take a screen grab and then store the file to your desktop. The first screen shot will be called Picture 1, and then further screen shots will be named Picture 2, Picture 3 and so on.

Windows Print Screen

Windows print screen copies the captured screen to the clipboard. Once you’ve done this the image can be pasted into a document using your application of choice (e.g Word/Wordpad etc.) by selecting >edit >paste from the toolbar or by pressing ‘Ctrl’ + ‘V’. There are two types of screen capture:

Capture Entire Screen: To take a screen capture of the entire screen in Windows 9x/XP/Vista simply press the ‘PrintScrn’ button. This takes a screen grab and stores it to the clipboard.

Capture Current Window: To take a screenshot of the current window (not the whole screen) in Windows 9X/XP/Vista hold down ‘Alt’ and Press ‘PrintScrn’.

I’ve just upgraded the hard disk in my 2.2ghz MacBook Pro using the hard disk from a Western Digital 320gb Pocket Drive. The USB pocket drive is fitted with a 2.5″ 320gb WD Scorpio Hard Drive (WD3200BEVT).

The idea is to plug the pocket drive into the macbook pro, clone the existing hard disk to the attached usb disk, verify the usb disk by booting off of it and finally physically install the Scorpio Hard disk into the laptop. This takes all of the data and the operating system from your old hard drive, and puts it all on to a new bigger drive. Buying the WD3200BEVT as part of the WD Pocket drive is about £20 more than buying the disk alone, but it gives you an easy method of transferring your system to a new disk without reinstalling everything.

First Step: Make sure you repartition the Pocket drive first so that it has one partition and the GUID option is chosen (under options). Using disk utility I performed a restore of my current hard disk to the attached pocket drive. This clones the internal hdd to the external usb drive. The process took about two hours. I then booted off of the USB drive (system preferences -> startup disk) to check that the drive was working and held all of my data. Next I disconnected and disassembled the pocket drive, removed the WD3200BEVT hard disk and began taking apart my macbook pro with the help of the ifix-it guide and some YouTube videos.

I found it useful to print out the ifix-it guide and whilst following the step-by-step instructions I taped the screws to corresponding section (in the instructions) using masking tape. Using this method I was able to make sure that none of the screws were muddled up or lost, and I knew where to fit them during reassembly, simply by following the instructions in reverse.

The hard disk upgrade has been completely successful and I also took the opportunity to install 4gb of RAM.