How to record your screen in Windows 11

Windows 11 still doesn’t offer a proper screen recorder, but there are ways you can record your display. Here’s how to do it.

Being able to record your screen is a feature that’s become more and more prominent in recent years. While it used to require special software or apps, platforms like Android, iOS, and even Windows have begun to adopt it as a system-wide feature. It’s incredibly useful — it makes it easy to show off a specific problem you’re having, or a potential solution to a problem someone else has. And of course, for gamers, it can also be useful to record your play sessions, especially if you want to share them online.

There are many ways to record your PC screen on Windows 11, but our focus is primarily on the built-in functionality of the OS. Let’s take a closer look.

It took far too long for Microsoft to implement a proper screen recoding tool in Windows 11, but the company finally did recently with an update to the Snipping Tool app. Previously, the Snipping Tool could only take and edit screenshots, but now it can record videos, too. It’s not as fully-featured as most third-party tools, but for most people, it provides a good enough solution. Here’s how to use it:

Open the Snipping Tool app (you can find it in the All apps list in the Start menu).
Select the video camera icon to switch to video recording mode.
Click New in the top left corner of the window.
You’ll be prompted to choose a screen recording area, which can be any rectangular area, including the entire screen.

You can’t record across multiple monitors using the Snipping Tool.
Click the Start button at the top of the screen and you’ll see a 3-second countdown before the recording starts.
Click Stop to finish the recording when you’re done.

As you can see, it’s fairly simple to start a screen recording this way. As I said, it’s not a very advanced tool, but this already allows you to do any kind of basic recording, and most people won’t need more than that.

Recording games with Xbox game bar in Windows 11

The method above is great for recording anything that happens in the typical desktop environment, but if you want to record footage of a game, the Xbox game bar is a better solution. This feature has been in Windows for a few years, and it can record pretty much any app, but it’s most useful for games, especially if you’re playing in fullscreen mode. Here’s how to use it:

Open the game you want to record. Full-screen games are supported, but the Windows desktop and File Explorer aren’t.
Press Windows key + G. The default Xbox game bar interface will look something like this. Capture tools are in the upper right corner. If the capture tools aren’t visible, you can click the Capture button in the top bar (it looks like a webcam).

The Capture controls include a few options, from left to right:
- Take screenshot lets you take a still screenshot
- Record last 30 seconds allows you to save the last 30 seconds of gameplay. This feature is only available for software that’s recognized as a game (see below)
- Start recording starts recording the game from the current point
- The microphone button lets you mute or unmute your microphone during the recording
Click the Start recording button and the click an empty area of the screen to dismiss the game bar UI. You can stop recording or turn the microphone on or off with the small bar that shows up.

If you click the Record last 30 seconds button, the video will automatically be saved in your videos folder.
When you stop recording, a pop-up will notify you the video has been recorded and you can click it to view the video in the Xbox game bar. You can open the file’s location from here too, so you can send the video to anyone you want.
You can always press Windows + G to bring up the Xbox game bar again. To view your gallery, click the widgets button on the left edge of the bar at the top, then click Gallery. This will let you view all your recordings and screenshots.

You can also find your recordings in File Explorer, in a Captures folder in your Videos library.
If you want to start a recording without opening the Xbox game bar every time, you can press Windows key + Alt + R. This will start a recording right away, and you can use the same combination to stop the recording.

Setting up automatic recordings

In some games, it’s hard to know when you’re going to pull off a cool move or run into a memorable moment. That’s why the Xbox game bar gives you the option to record the last 30 seconds of gameplay as we mentioned above. The way it works is that the computer is constantly recording in the background, so when you want to save a moment, you can just use that option or press Windows + Alt + G to immediately save what just happened.

The feature is enabled when you click the Record last 30 seconds button for the first time, and it’s a good idea to do that beforehand so you can just use it right away when you need to. But it only works for software that the game bar remembers as a game. If this button is greyed out for you, follow these steps:

Open the Xbox game bar while running the game or app you want to record.
Click the settings icon (the gear icon) in the bar at the top of your screen.
In the General section (it opens by default), check the box that says Remember this is a game.
From now on, Xbox game bar will always record that app or game in the background, and you can press Windows + Alt + G to save the last 30 seconds.

Note that enabling this feature will increase system resource usage since the computer is constantly recording. It shouldn’t have a huge impact on performance, but you might notice it on slower hardware.

Change your recording settings

If you want to tweak some of the recording settings for the Xbox game bar, you can do it in the Windows 11 Settings app. These settings include the video recording quality, duration, and more. Here’s how it works:

Open the Settings app, then head into the Gaming section and click Captures.
You’ll see this page with a variety of options. Here’s what these settings do.
1. Record what happened: This toggle enables or disables the automatic recording of gameplay. You can expand this option to choose a few other settings, such as the length for automatic recordings (the maximum is 10 minutes) and whether automatic recordings should be enabled on battery power or while projecting your screen.
2. Max recording length: Changes the maximum duration for recordings you start manually (up to 4 hours).
3. Capture audio when recording a game: This toggle lets you enable or disable audio during a game recording. You can expand this option to choose the audio recording quality, your microphone and system audio volume, and whether background apps should be muted so only the game is audible.
4. Video frame rate: You can choose between recording videos at 30fps or 60fps. A higher frame rate requires more resources, so it can affect performance.
5. Video quality: Choose whether to record video with Standard quality or High quality. This may affect overall performance while recording.
6. Capture mouse while recording a game: Choose whether your mouse cursor should be visible on screen during recordings.

Unlock more possibilities with third-party apps

While the built-in tools in Windows 11 do a pretty solid job for most people, there are a lot of third-party apps that take screen recording to new heights. One popular option is ShareX, though there are many others. ShareX makes it easy to quickly start a recording using a keyboard shortcut and it has a lot of advanced options for more experienced users. Here’s how to get started with ShareX

Download and install ShareX from the official website.
When it’s installed, run the app. You’ll see a list of hotkey shortcuts to start recording in Share, along with a lot of menu options. Take note that screen recording can be started by pressing Shift + Print Screen (it should be PrtSc on your keyboard).

On some keyboards, the PrtSc key may be a secondary function in another key. Press and hold Fn while pressing the PrtSc key if it doesn’t work normally.
You might get a warning because some of the default hotkeys for the app overlap with system shortcuts. If you want to change your hotkey shortcuts, you can click Hotkey settings… in the side menu. Hotkeys that conflict with system shortcuts will have a red square next to them. Screen recording shouldn’t be affected, so you don’t need to worry about this.
You can close the ShareX window and it’ll be minimized to the notification area in the bottom right corner of the taskbar.
You can press the hotkey for screen recording (Shift + Print Screen by default) to start recording at any time.
ShareX will ask you to choose a recording area. You can click any window to record that window, or if you’re on your desktop, you can click the background to record the entire screen. You can also draw a custom area to record a specific part of the screen. If you want to record the entire screen while an app is open, you’ll also need to manually select the entire area.
You can finish a recording by clicking the Stop button or cancel the recording with Abort. These options aren’t visible if you’re recording the entire screen, so you’ll need to look for the red dot in your system tray area. Alternatively, you can press Shift + Print Screen again to stop the recording.
A pop-up will appear so you can view your recorded video in your default video player. Videos are automatically saved in a dedicated ShareX folder in your Documents library by default. They save with randomly generated names, so you’ll want to sort by date to make things easier to find.

Change ShareX screen recording settings (and add audio recording)

If you want to change settings like the frame rate of the video recording or if you want to record audio along with the video, you’ll need to head into the app’s settings. Here’s what you need to do:

Open ShareX from the Start menu or desktop icon. You can also right-click the ShareX icon in the notification area and choose Open main window.
Click Task settings… in the side menu.
Choose Screen recorder in the side menu of the new window that shows up.
Here, you can customize the framerate of your video, set a delay for when recording starts, or a fixed duration for screen recordings.
To enable audio recording, click Screen recording options at the top.
In the Sources section, you can choose what sources to record video and audio from. By default, the only audio source available is your microphone, if you have one. To record system audio from your PC, you’ll need to click Install recorder devices.

This option won’t be available if you installed ShareX from the Microsoft Store.
Follow the installation process as normal, and you’ll see your sources change for both video and audio. The video source will be screen-capture-recorder and the audio source will be virtual-audio-capturer. This will enable recording system sounds, and you’ll need to change it back to your microphone if you want to record microphone audio instead. You can’t do both at the same time, unfortunately.
Close all the open windows, and you can now record your screen with system audio included.

These are the essential steps for recording your screen in Windows 11. With tools like ShareX, there’s a lot more you can do, but we’ll leave that up to you if you want to dive deeper into all the capabilities it offers. We mostly chose it for this guide because it’s a free tool that isn’t loaded with advertisements and restrictions forcing you to pay up.

Screen recording will work on any laptop or PC, but it can use significant resources, so if you have a very low-end PC, you may notice some performance issues, especially if you’re trying to record a game. If your laptop is too slow to play games while recording your screen, maybe check out the best gaming laptops on the market right. Those options are sure to have more than enough performance to handle screen recording.