This program provides an easy way of recording onscreen actions, and saving the results as a video file. It makes it an ideal tool for setting up tutorials and guides to Windows and other software.

Simply select the recording area - be it an individual box, a specific area or the full screen - press 'record' and then do what you want to do; pressing Escape ends the recording. One little criticism is the jerkiness of the mouse pointer during the capture, but it doesn't adversely affect operation.

Once you're happy with your recording you can save and export it. The recording will save as a WMV or AVI file, or as an animated GIF for sending as an email attachment or uploading to the internet. The files will play back automatically on your default media player once you have converted them.

With a free headset and microphone included it is very easy to record an accompanying commentary or other kind of audio track as well. You can choose whether to record at 8- or 16-bit quality, and in stereo or mono. You can also increase the sample rate, but the default of 22KHz is more than adequate for recording plain speech.

ScreenCorder works well and makes it very easy to convert your files and automatically compress them so they are all of a manageable size. We took a 20-second film of our 1024 x 768-resolution screen, accompanied by a continuous 8-bit mono audio commentary and then converted it into a WMV file.

This took up just 241Kb of memory, which is very little and makes storage demands a massive plus. Another good feature is the ability to record over any mistakes you find, until you are satisfied that everything is perfect.

Specifications:

Minimum requirements: Pentium 200MHz PC; 32Mb Ram; sound card; Windows 95 or NT4; Windows Media Player 7.

Contact: MatchWare 020 8940 9700 www.matchware.net