Running Games Windowed


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I only recently even saw the use in this feature while playing World of Warcraft. It enabled my to easily go into my explorer and search websites such as thottbot without having to alt-tab out.

Does anybody else do this? I'm considering doing it for all of my games, however I'd imagine in some FPS games you'd probably lose some of your field of view. (or is that wrong?)

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I do this on any game I can, usually for the same reason you do it with WoW, to surf the internet. :p I also voice chat on Skype sometimes, and I usually text chat on WLM.

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It makes sense to do it with MMO games like World of Warcraft; however, it doesn't make sense to do it with FPS games. By running a game in windowed mode, you'd have to run it at a resolution that's smaller than your desktop resolution. And doing that will make your view "smaller", if that makes any sense.

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If you're playing on a single monitor, how does running the game in windowed mode makes the alt+tab any more useful?

When you switch over a different window, it's the same as alt tabbing to it; you lose the focus from the game when the windows you switched to gets over it.

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I don't like doing this, playing games windowed takes away a lot of the immersion value

Agreed. I just wish there was a way to play full screen on 1 monitor and do stuff on the other monitor without the game on the 1st monitor minimizing :(

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When I was playing WoW I did it for that very reason. So I could easily switch to my web browser and look up quest info. Or see if I'm getting text messages. I might do it again when I start playing Aion as well...but I've got a second monitor now so who knows. I haven't ever done it while playing any other sort of game though.

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why not just use XFire http://www.xfire.com/ xfire gamers chat client but it has features so ya can chat while in gaming and surf the net with in-game browser

anyways give it a try

I used that when playing Fallout 3 because of the nasty bug that wouldn't allow you to switch back to Fallout 3 if you alt-tabbed out of it. It's useful in that respect, but it also caused my game to crash more than once, too.

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I play World of Warcraft in a window, but all other games I play are full screen.

I don't play WoW like I play other games. I like to be immersed in all over games, with no distraction. But with WoW, I don't want to be totally focussed on it.

Example: sometimes you might find yourself standing ramrod stiff waiting for something to happen in WoW. I don't like just staring blankly at the screen. So I'll do something else on the computer while I wait. xD

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I play all in fullscreen. WoW I play in windowed full screen without the option to resize so it's a heck of a lot quicker to alt+tab while in game.

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Wow, I expected more to say that they use it. I wouldn't want to with older games but several modern FPS games support windowed mode with no border and no titlebar and I'm sure many will follow. This means you can set it to your current resolution and it be just like running fullscreen because it will fill the screen completely.

Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead do this.

Counter-Strike Source does not but there are applications that can remove the titlebar for you.

I play windowed with just about every game.

I have only one monitor.

I choose to play windowed so that I can switch to another program quickly and I don't notice any significant drop in performance either.

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