Widescreen Gaming Forum

When playing my 3 monitor setup in Fullscreen, all games will randomly drop back to either windowed or minimized. There is no user input trigger as its happened when I've not had any hands on the keyboard or mouse, it just happens completely at random. I'm playing usually in 5760x1080 or 4800x900.

I've tried getting rid of all my resident programs currently running except McAfee obviously. I cant find any triggers for this behaviour - it seems 100% random. Luckily it doesn't happen every five minutes but usually every half hour and normally when I'm in the middle of a critical battle...

if it happens on all games it is clearly an external factor.

Reinstalling Windows might be the fastest way to get rid of that.

may i ask why you are running mcafee? generally speaking, anti viral softwares like mcafee and nortons tend to bog down a gaming rig, with windows 7 it has enough built in security that you do not need anything other than spybot search and destroy, which is totally free and does not need to be running in resident memory. If i were you, i would disable mcafee and see if you still have the issue of games losing focus.

I have this same problem and have figured it out to be a 3rd party program I am running...try documenting closing only 1 program in the system tray at a time before launching a game, and see if the problem continues.

For me it was a background switching program I use called "John's Background Switcher". If I pause it before I play, the problem does not reoccur, but it did take some detective work to figure out which program was the culprit! Good luck.

PS - I am a pc tech, and have used Avast on all my equipment for 5+ years, does a nice job of blocking malware sites and programs without being too obtrusive, and the Home Edition is free.

I've tried everything in my system tray. I can't disable mcafee - I can find no option to do so. I disabled real time scanning but nothing changed. I've changed my mouse, dropped out of each program in my in tray, tried disconnecting my external drives...pretty much everything I can change I've tried to change with no effect. Games still do an uncommanded minimise completely randomly.

Completely at wits end.

Greyhawk101 wrote:I've tried everything in my system tray. I can't disable mcafee - I can find no option to do so. I disabled real time scanning but nothing changed. I've changed my mouse, dropped out of each program in my in tray, tried disconnecting my external drives...pretty much everything I can change I've tried to change with no effect. Games still do an uncommanded minimise completely randomly.

Completely at wits end.

Not sure why, but my computer has appeared to stop doing this, might be video drivers (Nvidia) as I have updated them twice in the last couple of weeks.

tricky wrote:I have this same problem and have figured it out to be a 3rd party program I am running...try documenting closing only 1 program in the system tray at a time before launching a game, and see if the problem continues.

For me it was a background switching program I use called "John's Background Switcher". If I pause it before I play, the problem does not reoccur, but it did take some detective work to figure out which program was the culprit! Good luck.

PS - I am a pc tech, and have used Avast on all my equipment for 5+ years, does a nice job of blocking malware sites and programs without being too obtrusive, and the Home Edition is free.

I just set JBS to stop switching while steam is running, I never got booted out of fullscreen but I noticed that every 30 minutes I experienced some terrific framerate hits.

Do you think it might be power usage related? Maybe my PSU is not powerful enough?

If your PSU wasn't powerful enough you would be having a lot more problems than just that.

MobsterOO7 wrote:

tricky wrote:I have this same problem and have figured it out to be a 3rd party program I am running...try documenting closing only 1 program in the system tray at a time before launching a game, and see if the problem continues.

For me it was a background switching program I use called "John's Background Switcher". If I pause it before I play, the problem does not reoccur, but it did take some detective work to figure out which program was the culprit! Good luck.

PS - I am a pc tech, and have used Avast on all my equipment for 5+ years, does a nice job of blocking malware sites and programs without being too obtrusive, and the Home Edition is free.

I just set JBS to stop switching while steam is running, I never got booted out of fullscreen but I noticed that every 30 minutes I experienced some terrific framerate hits.

Good idea on JBS, I added all the games I currently playing. It happened a bunch of times during Hitman Absolution (like 3 times in 1 minute), but hasn't happened again since. Weird.