Allow 1 screen to focus on desktop, and other to focus on game?

Say I am playing a game, that game is a full screen game being displayed on one monitor, and I have itunes open in the other monitor. The song changes, and I dont like it, I can free my mouse, and move it to the other monitor, but if I click anything, Windows sees that as me wanting to focus the desktop, so it minimises the game. Is there a way to stop this?

Thanks

Hello Tomha,

In answer to your question: No, not that I am aware of. However, with a lot of programs, there are ways to make them windowed, and you can maximize the window so that it is like full screen with a windows border. Most likely it will pause any game you are playing if you click out of its window, but you can always unpause it.

You can make "maximized the default. Sometimes it is just as simple as right-clicking the application, clicking properties, under "run", click the pull down menu and select "Maximized". Sometimes with games and certain other applications, it isn't this simple. Sometimes code has to be entered into the game files, etc.

Hmm....The issue with windowed mode is performance. My graphics card isnt that great, (and will remain so for a while), and the fps difference between windowed vs fullscreen can be huge, simply because in fullscreen, all that needs to be rendered is the game, no desktop, no aero task bars, nothing but the game, it also allows the screen to change its display to a smaller resolution, and let the screen do the stretching, whereas in windowed, it relies on the operating system (and gpu) to stretch the resolution from that of the game to that the OS is in, if they are not the same. E.g. I play l4d2 in 720p, while my desktop is 1080p. When I start l4d2, my screens resolution sets to 720p, and it deals with the resizing (because its a 1080p screen). If I were to run it windowed, my graphics card now has to render all the elements of windows open, and has to stretch that image to the 1080p resolution the screen is in, causing a significant fps drop, one so large it can be the difference between 60fps and 20, playable, and unplayable. Thanks for the suggestion though, I appreciate it

Ah, true but I suppose it would depend on the game. For the more taxing games, this could be a problem for sure. I played on a vista, windowed NWN highest settings with a slightly overclocked GTS 250 1GB. Game is older so it wasn't too bad, and I slimmed some services in vista down so it wasn't top-heavy like the normal vista everyone hates. Frame rates are cool so long as you can tell the difference. Once it starts getting up there, sometimes there is no visable difference between two high numbers. You could optimize your computer for gaming, and you don't even have to get crazy about it. Just better know what you are doing when it comes to disabling stuff like services, etc.

So I would suppose there is no fix to this. You might look it up in google, but there are some iffy customizations out there so be careful.

My cpu and ram are more than ample for all my games, the GPU is the biggest bottle neck, I plan on fixing that when nvidia releases their next generation. Its not that the cpu is doing too many services, or that there isnt enough Ram, I believe its purely a matter of too little GPU power for the situation. I've tried googling, but im not really sure what the right search terms are . I know about them iffy customisations too, in my explorations today I managed to catch a keylogger just before I installed it , makes me wonder if perhaps there was something I didnt catch =/

Ouch.

What antivirus do you have? Malwarebytes works great even with an antivirus and may catch anything extra if you are interested (free).

In my experience (I am young, so maybe it isn't worth too much yet), there is no solution to your problem, unfortunately. if a light google search doesn't come up with anything, I am even more sure there isn't anything to be done about it. Min/Maximizing shouldn't take too long though. You might play music from a stereo or such while in a full screen app, or using the game's music instead

good luck however!

I use Microsoft security essentials Running a scan now, apparently its found a few things, that could be from any time though. Tbh I'm not overly concerned about viruses on my computer, so long as it doesn't "brick" my hardware, or cause complete data loss And thanks, I shall try malwarebytes