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Isn't Multitasking Great?

Right now I am running Lotro in a window (just watching the chat screen to see if any interesting groups come up) while playing Left 4 Dead 2 while downloading Area 51 (Free Download, Ad Supported) while writing this blog post. CPU usage is 10% rising to about 60% when I actually start shooting Zombies.



The second screen is an old Dell monitor courtesy of my brother who recently upgraded his PC and was throwing this out. I hooked it up to my machine and I have fallen in love with dual monitors. Now that PCs are powerful enough to actually run more than one programme at a time I find it really improves productivity. When I am working I find I can review a document on one screen while typing my comments on the other. When gaming I can have a browser open on one screen while a game is being played on the other. One minor annoyance is that most games demand focus if you want to run them in full screen mode. Left 4 dead is somewhat unusual in that it has a border less windowed mode that behaves like full screen but allows you to change the focus to another application without minimising the game.
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Anonymous said…
Multitasking was, of course, raved about when the PC world was still using MSDOS ... back in the *real* golden days of gaming. :P

As for borderless fullscreen windows, I found that KDE does a great job of managing all DirectX games in this very manner.

I'll leave you to work out what KDE is. :)


Solbright
1:02 pm
mbp said…
Hi Sol - KDE is a linux front end and DirectX is a microsoft invention so I am guessing you are talking about running games under Wine?
2:25 pm
Anonymous said…
Yup. There is some amazing talent to pull off such an undertaking as Wine.
5:48 am
Stabs said…
Ha ha that's just like my set up. Eve in particular goes well with other games.
9:09 am
mbp said…
Hi Stabs

Yes I seem to recall that CCP took special pains to ensure you could run several instances of EVE in windows on one computer to facilitate players who were flying alts (and paying multiple subs of course).
10:13 am
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