Netbook Network

Total Screen Recorder Gold is a screen recorder that allows you to record your desktop screen into a video at a set frames per second so you can upload your video or presentation onto Youtube or some other video sharing site. Total Screen Recorder Gold is published by the Total Screen Recorder team – and costs a good $30 out of your pocket to get the application in full. Do the features justify the price? Read more to find out!

Installation is quick and easy. It includes the standard set of options (where to save, create shortcuts, etc.) and takes just a few seconds to fully get installed. No system restart is required. Activation is kind of a pain, though. In order to activate the software, you must enter an extremely long license key (think three times the length of a Windows license key) – and then restart the application which will take about half a minute to get done. It’s not exactly a tedious process, just really frustrating.

Once you launch Total Screen Recorder Gold, you’ll be presented with a Tip Of The Day window. It’s actually quite helpful and doesn’t offer useless information, and you can always turn it off if you don’t like it.

Next, the user interface. There’s a picture at the top of the blog post that I’ll describe. At the top, is your standard options bar – you can select to record, stop, play, change settings, view your history, etc. It’s pretty clean and straightforward. Underneath, you’ll be presented with a list of options. Double clicking on the options will bring up an option panel that looks like this: (click to enlarge)

The options panel provides quite an array of options to choose from. I’ll let you look at the image and see for yourself. The other option tabs include settings that allow you to select a video encoder, and the ability to choose where your videos are saved. The options menu shouldn’t be an extra popup, but should be in the main window itself, replacing the list, because the options menu includes everything on the list via tabs, so it’s pointless to have the options menu not in the main window – just about anything you click on the main window will bring up the options menu anyway.

Next, the performance – how well does TSRG run? I’m reviewing TSRG on a desktop computer. I have a quad core Intel processor with each core clocked at 2.4 Ghz, 6 GB of DDR2 RAM, and a Nvidia 8400 GS chipset. These are adequate specs to run graphic intensive games and cpu-eating video converters, so TSRG should be able to run nicely, right?

Wrong. Recording is shaky, takes up way too much CPU, and doesn’t record window movements correctly. I recorded at 10 frames per second, and if you look closely (turn on HD) you’ll find the recorder made the video go two times the speed (there’s a time recorded ticker on the main window at the bottom). Not only that, Windows Aero gets disabled while you record.

I checked their website which can be found here and it’s very unprofessional. There’s a lot of grammar issues and spelling errors making it look extremely unprofessional, and even worse, it advertises ratings that don’t exist. On the left column, it states that CNET has given it 5 stars, when in reality, there was no real editor review, and the software is rated at 4 stars with no user reviews (I’m betting they rated their own product).

Conclusion:
I simply cannot recommend Total Screen Recorder Gold. It’s got a nice interface and easy to use options menu, but there are too many downsides to the program. Recording is choppy (for me at least), it uses around 50% CPU (on my quad core computer) and doesn’t even support Windows Aero. With all these issues and a very unprofessional website, Total Screen Recorder is a definite thumbs down. At $30, it is overpriced for such a program with abilities that free alternatives can do better.

Pros:
-Clean, simple interface
-Tip of the day
-Select from multiple encoders
-Wide array of recording options

Cons:
-Activation is a pain
-Disables Windows Aero
-Extremely High CPU Usage for such a program (50%!)
-Expensive at $30
-Fails to record window movements properly
-Fails to encode properly (double speed)

For Netbooks:
-Fits under 1024×600
-Uses a lot of CPU
-Not recommended

Free Alternatives:
BlueBerry Flashback Express
Camstudio

If you wish to buy a copy of Total Screen Recorder, it can be found here.