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I have a dual monitor setup running Windows XP, and when I hit "Print Screen" and try to paste into Paint, it fails with the error "error getting the clipboard data". Holding down alt-print screen works fine, to just capture a single window.

Is there a permanent solution to this? I'd rather not mess with third-party tools.

salmonmoose
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Jeffrey
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8 Answers8

5

I had same problem. Reduce harware accel & reduce to 16 bit color. I have an ATI Fire GL V5200 with dual outputs.

Patrick
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I'm having the same problem, too. I'm currently running 4 monitors, both on nvidia hardware, with two on an older FX 5500, and the other two on my newer 9400 GT. It took some doing to make the different generations of drivers play nicely together.

I think that Windows is having a problem combining the images from framebuffers in different physical RAM locations (half on one card, half on the other).

That's my guess anyway.

The symptoms are the same: alt-printscreen works like a champ, but the whole-desktop printscreen seems like it doesn't even capture a picture. Photoshop usually is aware of the size of the image in the clipboard, and ctrl-n will create a new document with those dimensions. The size of my desktop is 5120x1024, but the new document is created at 900x1585 (probably just the size of whatever I last pasted in there).

I should have plenty of RAM. I tried reducing the hardware acceleration on all four monitors to the minimum level, and still nothing happens. I turned off write combining, and that might do something (just a stab in the dark though), but I won't know till after I reboot.

For now, Gadwin Printscreen (free download) did the trick, but it only captured my primary screen.

1

I know you don't want to bother with 3rd party tools, but you really should look into Purrint. It can copy the screenshots to the clipboard, save them to a file (any format) or do both, automatically, every time you press Print Screen. Also has multi-monitor support, which might help your case here. Plus it's a tiny application (136k installer, uses 344k RAM).

TJ L
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Easy....Just change the image attributes in paint to match your total screen size. If one monitor is 1680x1050 and you have a background on there that stretches along both screens, the background would have to be 3360x1050....so if you print screen, you need to go to paint, change the attributes to 3360x1050 and then hit paste. ....next question. ;)

Easy D
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It certainly sounds like that you haven't got enough memory available to hold the full image on the clipboard. The fact that it fails for a maximised window as well as the full screen supports this.

A couple of questions:

  • What screen resolution are you running at?
  • How much memory have you got installed? Though this shouldn't be an issue with virtual memory.
  • What's the size of your paging file? Both it's current size and maximum size (if not set to "System managed size").

If you lower your screen resolution can you get it to work?

I'm running with 2GB of RAM and two monitors at 1600 x 1200 x 32bpp and I can print the whole desktop.

ChrisF
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I think this might be a problem with the size of image that MS Paint can handle. Can you paste it into another application, possibly WordPad?

heavyd
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Here's some ideas:

  • Try lowering your hardware acceleration. (Right click desktop > properties > settings > advanced > troubleshoot)
  • Try disabling your display driver.
  • Try it in safe mode.
zildjohn01
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I tried everything. Everything. Everything, short of rebooting.

Reboot fixed it. Sad, but just relaying the truth.

anon
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