CamStudio is a tool that lets you record a SWF or AVI video of your computer's screen.

The program has a standard interface. In the toolbar you can start, pause or stop recording, toggle the view (normal, compact, buttons), the display of screen annotations dialog and the recording mode (to AVI or SWF).

In the main menu, you can select which region you want to record (region, fixed region, window, full screen), use screen and video annotations, as well as add effects (system time stamp, Xnote time stamp, caption, watermark).

In Video Options you can select the compressor and adjust quality and time lapse, Cursor Options let you hide or show the cursor (actual, custom), highlight the cursor and enable visual click feedback, while audio options can be set for the microphone, speakers, but also audio and video synchronization.

Furthermore, you can convert AVI to SWF, disable audio recordings, set autopan speed, assign keyboard shortcuts, as well as set CamStudio to automatically stop recording and delete the intermediate AVI file upon completion, to ask you to rename the output video file and play the AVI file once the task is completed, and more.

The program uses a low amount of system resources, and the audio and video quality of the output files is excellent. Unfortunately, it doesn't have an available help file, so first-time users would have a hard time comprehending its functions (the software crashed once when we tried accessing the help file).  Even so, we strongly recommend CamStudio.