How do I create a GIF screencast in Windows?

I've been using licecap in various Super User answers. It's dead simple to use as you can see from this animated GIF image - just extend it over your recording area, hit record, set a save file, do your thing and hit stop. It's free, works pretty well, and seems simpler than most of the alternatives. It's entirely free and has Windows and OS X ports.

On Windows 8.1 and hdpi displays, you'll need to turn off per app display scaling to get it to work normally without turning off global display scaling. I have a walkthrough on it here (Fixed as of version 1.26.)

I found GifCam, which is free for Windows.

It worked well for my needs to capture and export the GIF image.

Some nice features:

• Works from a single executable. I didn't need to install anything else to get it going
• Has options to adjust the frame timing and to delete/add frames via a built in editor
• You can add text to frames:
• You can show/hide the cursor
• Yoyo option so that the GIF image it loops back on itself.
• Draw Green Screen over frames to create a cinemagraph.

Disclosure: I have no affiliation with the product or developer.

Screen To Gif is an excellent free solution. It has a lot of features including save directly to folder, hotkeys to start/stop recording, hide/show mouse, etc.