How to Take a Screenshot on an HP Laptop (5 Easy Methods)

Look at the top row of your HP keyboard, just past F12 toward the upper right. The key is usually labeled PrtScn, PrtSc, or PrtScrn. On full-size HP keyboards it sits between F12 and the Delete key.

On smaller HP laptops, like the Stream or a 14-inch Envy, the Print Screen label is printed in small text and shares a key with another function. If the label looks faint or sits in the bottom-half of the keycap, you will need to hold the Fn key in the lower-left corner together with Print Screen. Try the key on its own first - if nothing happens, add Fn.

Tap the Print Screen key once. Nothing visible happens. Windows just quietly copies a snapshot of your entire desktop to the clipboard - including all open windows, the taskbar, and every connected monitor.

To see the screenshot, open Paint, Word, an email, or any app that accepts pasted images. Press Ctrl + V. The screenshot drops in. From Paint you can crop it, save it as a JPG or PNG, or print it. This is the fastest way to grab everything at once when you do not care about cropping.

Click the window you want to capture so it is the active window. Then hold Alt and tap Print Screen. Windows copies only that window to the clipboard - skipping your desktop, your taskbar, and any other open apps.

This is the cleanest way to share a screenshot of a single program. No cropping, no extra background. Paste it into Paint or an email with Ctrl + V. The screenshot will match the exact size of the window border, so big windows make big screenshots and small windows make small ones.

Hold the Windows logo key and tap Print Screen. The screen dims for half a second to confirm the capture. Behind the scenes Windows saves a PNG file straight to your computer.

Open File Explorer, go to This PC, then Pictures, then a folder called Screenshots. Your image is in there, named Screenshot (1), Screenshot (2), and so on. No clipboard, no pasting, no extra apps - the file is already saved and ready to attach to an email or upload anywhere.

This is the most flexible built-in option. Press Windows + Shift + S together. Your screen dims and a small toolbar appears at the top with four icons: rectangular snip, freeform snip, window snip, and fullscreen snip.

Click the rectangular icon, then drag a box around the part of the screen you want. Release the mouse and Windows copies that region to your clipboard. A small notification pops up in the bottom-right corner. You can paste the snip into any app with Ctrl + V, or click the notification to open it for markup.

Click the small notification that popped up after your snip. The Snipping Tool editor opens with your screenshot loaded. The toolbar gives you a red ballpoint pen, a yellow highlighter, an eraser, a ruler, and a crop tool.

Draw a circle around the important part, highlight a sentence, or crop off any extra space at the edges. When the snip looks the way you want, click the small save icon in the upper right (it looks like a floppy disk). Pick a folder, name the file, and click Save. The image saves as PNG by default.

If you take screenshots every day, install ShareX from getsharex.com. It is completely free and open source. Once installed, ShareX adds three things Windows does not have out of the box: scrolling screenshots that capture an entire long web page, OCR text capture that converts a screenshotted block of text into copy-pasteable words, and a real annotation editor with shapes, text boxes, arrows, and numbered step markers.

From the ShareX main window, click Capture, then pick Region, Window, Scrolling capture, or Text capture (OCR). You can also set a global hotkey so a single key press starts a snip. After capture, ShareX can copy to your clipboard, save to a folder, and upload to Google Drive or Imgur all at the same time.