The Admin’s Arsenal: lsgrab.exe

Several months ago I found myself with a unique need; I needed to take screenshots of a remote machine at specified times during the day (don’t ask, it’s a long story filled with management douchebaggery). I did quite a bit of searching, and eventually settled on lsgrab.exe by Geert Moernaut (I’m pretty sure this guy is responsible for Lansweeper, which El Di Pablo recently reviewed).

This little gem is a console application designed to do one thing: take screenshots of remote computers.

There are a few caveats (but it filled the need I had):

• It is NOT free. It is donation ware, the author requests a €5 donation (about $9 USD), however this is not stated anywhere before you download it (it’s in the readme file in the .zip download).
• You must have administrative permissions on the target computer.
• Someone must be logged on to the target computer.
• Works on Windows 2000, Windows 2003, XP (I haven’t tested it on Vista or 2008 yet).

Since it’s a console app I just copied it into the C:\Windows directory on my workstation, and then wrote a script to use it to take timestamped screenshots. Worked great. I’m not sure what other uses I might find for it, but for the $9 buy in, it is definitely something I will drop into my bag of tricks.

You can download lsgrab.exe here