In preparation for our recent presentation on Virtual Earth I made a few "backup videos" of the demos we were going to show. We've tried a few different screen capture tools before and most of them seemed to kill your pc so made the video pretty useles.
The 2 I experimented with and found pretty reasonable were:
- Wink - It's free and simple to use. It can create PDF's or output the result to flash.
- Windows Media Encoder - It's free and simple to use. It outputs (funnily enough) Windows Media files so good for upload to things like YouTube, SoapBox etc.
After playing with them a bit I ended up useing Windows Media Encoder. You can capture whole screen, specific window, or an area of the screen. You then pretty much hit play and stop. It flashes a red border around the area you're capturing just to remind you and so you know it's recording. It was super easy to use and didn't hog my computer resources. Afterwards you can use something like Movie Maker to add commentary, edit it etc.