Stupid Snipping Tool

Dacelonid

It was only when I started using this tool that I realised how useful it was, and now that it is broken I am lost without it.

I am in a corporate network, so have very little scope to mess around changing things, and I don't think I'll be able to explain it very well over the phone to someone in India/Bulgaria/Uzbekistan or wherever our call centre is this week.

I have an HP Mobile Workstation Elitebook 8540W, with Windows Vista Enterprise SP2 with CPU i5 M540, 4Gb RAM and a nVidia Quadro FX 1800M

So when I start my laptop and log in, I can use Snipping tool no problem. At some point however something fecks up, and it no longer works, it just gives an error message "Snipping tool is not working ...". In fact no screen capture application works. eg in fastStone Capture, which launches but the output is either blank or red, depending on whether I capture a fullscreen or application window

Any advice online seems to be about reinstalling MsOffice, but that isn't really an option for me.
Does anybody have any idea where I would go about figuring out what is happening.
There is nothing in the event viewer that I can see, the services are all online. I just don't see where I can start looking to figure out some kind of solution


Forgot to add, when it does happen, all the icons (about 6) on my desktop disappear. They are not gone, just not visible. If I move the mouse over them they appear again, but will disappear if I was to click "show Desktop" or do a Win+D

Dacelonid

Found a workaround at least, that I thought I would share in case anyone else has the same problem

First I added two shortcuts to my desktop context menu, 1 to turn Aero on and the other to turn it off
HowTo:
http://www.door2windows.com/how-to-add-turn-off-aero-shortcut-in-context-menu/

http://www.door2windows.com/how-to-add-turn-on-aero-shortcut-in-context-menu/

Now whenever I have the same issue, I disable Aero and then turn it back on.

Snipping tool still doesn't work, but other screen capture tools do.

Fluffy88

From the sounds of it your probably working in the same company as me. Who's your manager so I can report ya for using boards during work :P

I get the same problem all the time too, in-fact I just tried to open it there and I get the error. From what I can see the issue is purely down to RAM. Using 32bit Vista we can have a total of 4GB of RAM and since the graphics card uses 1GB of that you will only have a max of 3GB and when you have Eclipse with a tonne of projects open, a browser and Exceed you have pretty much tapped out your RAM hence the snipping tool or any screen capture tool has no-where to store it's image.

I find even if you close all those programs to free up your RAM the snipping tools doesn't want to start then either, so restarting explorer or doing your little Aero trick should get it working again once you've freed up some RAM for it.

Leeg17

This may be of completely no use to you OP (because I don't know what's causing the above errors) but try Gyazo, it instantly uploads the screen capture to the internet and copies the URL to your clipboard..

r3nu4l

Fluffy88 wrote: »

From the sounds of it your probably working in the same company as me. Who's your manager so I can report ya for using boards during work :P

You should be safe, you posted at 13.08...lunchtime, he's screwed though
Have't had this issue myself but good to know you found a workaround Dacelonid, I'll bear that in mind if it does happen to me!