How to Screen Record Your Laptop with Internal or Mic Audio

Although laptops are generally less powerful than desktop computers at a similar price, they can bring about much convenience thanks to their compact size. For working or entertainment purposes, people love to take the laptop along to handle business stuff or just for fun on the move. Then how to screen record your laptop? What’s the best laptop screen recorder for your machine, maybe an old low-end, mid-spec, or high-performance gaming one?

To begin with, many customers wonder how can they take screencasts on laptops and whether their laptops are good enough to capture screen video. We want to say, that a laptop, the portable version of the desktop computer, holds the same ability as a PC does. Therefore, the best screen recording software for PC/Mac is also suitable for laptops in terms of the products themselves. The only thing that matters is the real performance of the screen recorder, because most commonly used laptops don’t have high configuration.

Content Overview:

How to Record Screen on Laptop Easily with RecMaster
Tips on Choosing Laptop Screen Recorder for Low/Middle-end Notebooks
Tips on Selecting Laptop Screen Recorder for High-end Notebooks

1 – What’s the best screen recording software for low or middle-level laptops?

For the general public, just take a laptop as a handy working platform, a learning assistant, a reaction tool, a music recording entity, or similar. So they won’t invest too much on this lightweight thing, maybe between $400 –$800, or any value no more than $1000.

It’s hard to tell which screen recorder is the best one. But there are several tips for software selection:

● For outdated laptops with cheap components, choosing a system built-in tool like Game Bar or a light recorder like Fraps and Dxtory is quite recommended in case the CPU is maxed out. You can pay special attention to the package size and system requirements before your download.

● If you have picked one proper laptop screen recorder, but it performs badly, how to record smoothly on your (low-end) laptop? You can improve this situation by lowering recording parameters. As to video recording, they are exactly the resolution/size, frame rate, and bit rate. Setting a higher compression codec is also a good way to boost the efficiency. Common freeware and paidware, for example, OBS Studio, Bandicam, and RecMaster, all provide such pre-settings.

● Different recorders have different workflows. Some record the raw footage during the capture process and process/encode it after the recording while some do the real-time encoding as the capture goes on. “Recording first and encoding next” is of course better because it will put less burden on the computer. Filmora scrn is such a tool that carries out this workflow. VLC Media Player also features “dumping raw input” to record without compression.

2 – What’s the best laptop screen recorder for high-end machines?

If you are a gaming phile and spend much time with large-scale video games on your laptop, it must have strong internals such as decent Graphic cards, processors, and SSD to boost the performance. In this case, there is normally no problem with running external recording software. So you can choose the one that features what you need most (e.g. advanced capture settings on video, built-in editor, one-click sharing) and has support for GPU hardware encoding. OBS Studio (free), Filmora scrn, and Bandicam are reliable names available for both Windows and macOS.

If you are not willing to use the third-party software, you can take advantage of the system’s built-in tools like Game Bar on Windows 10-based laptops, and QuickTime Player on MacBook Air/Pro. Also, both Nvidia and AMD offer such free screencast service once your GPU meets the usage condition. Nvidia Shadowplay, Nvidia Ansel, and AMD Radeon ReLive, you deserve the one your notebook embraces.

3 – How to Record Laptop Screen on Windows (10) or macOS (10.15)

Below we will show you how to record your laptop screen with our easy and feature-rich screen recorder RecMaster. Please free download it here, finish the setup, and then launch it on your laptop from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple or so to go ahead.

Step 1 – Choose a Mode
Multiple recording modes are preloaded to capture gameplay, full-screen activity, customized area operation, webcam only, and audio only. You just need to select the one that fits your needs and then go to step 2 for settings.

Step 2 – Set for the Recording
You can do settings in two panels. One is the secondary main window and the other one is what pops up after clicking the Settings option on this window.

On the main window, you are free to select monitor if you have more than one, define the video format, recording quality, frame rate, and whether to show the webcam/system sound/microphone. Specifically, quality level and frame rate both influence the final quality and size of the recorded file. So keep the balance yourself according to your laptop condition and the importance of the capture. By turning on the Webcam, you can show your face alongside the screen and achieve a picture-in-picture effect.

Note that if your goal is to record multiple screens at the same time, choose Custom Area mode and select the whole area with your mouse. Certain resolutions are also offered in this mode to help you create PC-friendly or mobile-friendly video at a fixed aspect ratio like 16:9 or 9:16.

On the other Settings panel, you can define your favored saving folder, enable and set cursor effects & watermark, check and change the hotkeys, and also do something regarding auto-start. For timed and auto recording, please leverage the Task schedule feature>>

Step 3 – Start and Stop the Recording
Once the settings are fully made, you can click the red buttons to start, pause, and end the recording. During the recording, annotation work is available, access to its control by clicking the Annotation icon on the small floating bar. After the recording, you are empowered to do easy edits and share the work online directly to YouTube or Google Drive in clicks.

Final Words on Laptop Screen Recorder

All in all, screen recording on laptop of HP, Lenovo, Macbook, or other brands is not hard because there are so many dedicated laptop screen recorders you can rely on. However, if the recording process or recorded file is not as smooth or well as you think even though you have tried every suggestion mentioned above, maybe you should consider upgrading your laptop or doing the same work on a better laptop.

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How to Record Screen on MacBook Air/Pro