If you have a fairly powerful machine you can use Open Broadcaster Studio software. It is optimized for Live-Streaming but can also record locally. If you have NVENC-compatible Nvidia-GPU (7xx or newer) or an Intel i5/i7 3xxx or newer you can use their hardware encoding to record with virtually no performance hit. OBS if free as in free beer, open-source and can record the whole screen or only single windows (Vista SP2 or newer required.) If you need help, drop into our IRC help channel, #obsproject @ quakenet (or use webchat from the OBS homepage). Download: https://www.obsproject.com/[^] How-To for local recording with best quality: https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/how-to-make-high-quality-local-recordings.16/[^]