Haloo, you may remember that I was having problems with my computer a bit back, well it all went tits up and I ended up with a reformat.

Everything has since been fine, but I have one annoying problem. Every about 15 minutes, a program pops up on the taskbar, and then almost straight away disapears again. I cant tell what program it relates to as its symbol is the same white box you get when something is not responding. I assume its something that updates itself, but it still does it offline.
Virus scanner is up to date, and spybot checks have been done.

The problem is that with games this causes a second or so stutter in the case of CS, or at worst with other games, they minimise, leaving me back at desktop, which is quite annoying.

Is there any way of descovering what program it is causing this problem? Cheers.

Try running cs in a window for a bit. You'll play atrociously like that but you should be able to read the pop-up thingy.

Either that or you are getting owned by msm

You cant read it though, it has no writing in it. I have suspiscions that its something to do with my printer, HP is pretty bad in terms of software.

does this happen when you are in TS?

see if its when you hit CAPS lock, i get it too, i think its from Avast.. but im not sure.. and i should work out how to turn it off, if anyone knows pls post.

i run avast, no probs here?

it may be the avast updater, it does have a systray icon. - maybe turn update notifications off?

does VC even run avast?...

any program that "steals focus" from cs will crash it.
its not the programs fault, its css/source.
the engine/valve? crashes (without error) when it regains focus.

if you minimize css then maximize it again, you can re-produce the same effect.

lots of applications will create icons and popups in the systray, WGA, Program Updates (avast, etc), XP system messages (low disk space, etc)...

Na dont have avast.

Its not such a big prob in CS, its more annoying in a car game when your half way round the lap then boom im back at desktop. I know its harmless, just annoying that its causing games to minimise.

run scans with:

- spybot S&D
- Ad-Aware
- spyware Dr (dont buy it, just scan)

and see what it finds...
make sure you update them all...

not sure which antivirus you have...?
but i would say avast is prob the best free one out there atm

[KM] + FROG + wrote:

any program that "steals focus" from cs will crash it.
its not the programs fault, its css/source.
the engine/valve? crashes (without error) when it regains focus.

if you minimize css then maximize it again, you can re-produce the same effect.

Not true, the issue is RAM. If you end up putting any of the memory being used by source onto the hard disk swap then it will crash. If you have 2GB of ram it will tab out nicely.

nope

i have 2.5gb of ram, and i have no swap file to be overwritten...

(when a program needs memory, windows will give it to the program - but it will give it free memory. the only time you can have memory problems is when you are writing/reading directly to/from memory - this is done a lot in c, which is what css is written in - but any problems there and its valve's call)

when the game has no/lost focus valve have implamented a procedure to slash the FPS and therefor free the CPU usage as your not playing game... (tbh im not sure about that... but it does happen valve or not)

i think they do this because when you alt+tab windows does not minimize the window and therefore does not change the process/thread prioritys (at OS/Kernel level) in the same way.

min and maxing a window is a lot diferent to just alt+tabbing it and bringing another window into focus

when you minimize a window in windows (/sigh) it dumps all the un-needed memory and also cuts the CPU priority.... thinking about it, that probably is what crashes it .. . . . . . ?

if that is whats crashing it then its

1) nothing to do with hardware
2) part of windows!

tbh you should explain your last post some more