If you are using Windows you can take screen shots by pressing the Windows Key and the PrintScreen key at the same time, which will put it on your clip board and then you can paste it into a painting program to get a file out of it. I'm not sure why you think you need to fork out large sums of money, let alone any money, unless you intend to purchase maps. To help you though we really do need more specifics. More specific questions, more specific goals, more specific examples etc. Incidentally just defining your mapping problems more specifically often helps tremendously in and of itself.