Patent ID: 7447997

Claim:
A computer-readable medium storing in storage computer-executable instructions for causing a computer system programmed thereby to perform a method of capturing a screen area in display by a visual display unit, the method comprising: based upon analysis of one or more display driver commands, determining for each of one or more regions of the screen area whether to provide the region with or without bit block transfers from a display card frame buffer, that buffers the screen area for display by the visual display unit that displays the screen area wherein each of the one or more display driver commands is a drawing command sent from an operating system and received by one or more display drivers, and wherein the analysis includes for a new display driver command of the one or more display driver commands: converting the new display driver command into a new screen capture operation; comparing new screen capture operation to one or more previous screen capture operations in a list, wherein the comparing includes: identifying a first portion of the screen area that is affected by the new screen capture operation; identifying a second portion of the screen area that is affected by a selected one of the previous screen capture operations in the list; identifying a relation between the first portion of the screen area and the second portion of the screen area; and setting a first region of the one or more regions of the screen area based upon the relation between the first portion of the screen area and the second portion of the screen area; and depending on results of the comparing, selectively adding the new screen capture operation into the list while simplifying the list by removing or replacing at least one redundant operation among the one or more previous screen capture operations in the list; and constructing a representation of the screen area in system memory.