SnagIt Snags my Vista CPU Relentlessly
August 29, 2008 by Milo Riano
Filed under Computers
I am researching on various screen capture utilities and it seems SnagIt has the best feature set among all of them.
However; this software gets under my skin. In the image above, the CPU usage of SnagIt on my Vista Enterprise installation is hovering at 45% and it seems to drag the sidebar as well (when I kill the SnagIt process, the sidebar quiets down) at 32% for a total of 77%. These numbers are idle time for SnagIt as I have not done anything yet. When I do a screen capture the SnagIt process zooms to 90% give or take. For whatever reason when I do a screen capture with SnagIt, it takes around 6 minutes before the editor pops up with the image I have snagged. It is faster when the editor is already open and the image pops up instantaneously but it uses up my CPU all throughout.
It was a good thing I tried the trial version first before going ahead and paying for 49.95 here; though I really like this product, and I have yet to email their support and hopefully they have a patch of some sort that I can apply to make my experience faster.
For the meantime I am making do with the built-in Windows Vista screen capture tool called the Snipping Tool. Just type “snipping tool” in the run command and you should be able to locate it. If you can’t you’ll have to install this in the add/remove components in the control panel of Vista.
Other screen capture tools I would be trying out in the next few days are:
I would recommend you CapTrue (http://www.captrue.com). This one is very simple, basically it is a Print Screen enchancer. No unused editing stuff, no sophisticated GUI – just a little work horse, that will not eat all your free memory :). You can capture your desktop to file or Clipboard, capture just an active window, save to different names and formats (BMP, JPEG, PNG), but!
The main feature of this app is the ability to capture video players windows. Fraps or SnagIt, for example, are able to capture the content of video player (a movie frame), but CapTrue cap capture the whole desktop without ugly black rectangles instead of your movie :)
Yes – the latest version (9.0.2) does the same for me, and it is the snagit editor itself which eats the CPU. But I will say that it has been working very well until recently and is an exceptional piece of software. But this appears to be an interference or incompatibility problem. I upgraded but also added a number of other programmes and so it is hard to pin down the issue. At present it is unuseable. Which is a shame, because when it is working I have found it indispensible.