Alt+Tabbing out of Source games causing freezes on G73JH-BST7

First post/thread since getting my new computah!

Sad to say it has to be about a problem.. As the title says, the game program freezes specifically when I alt+tab back in to the game. It simply gets stuck at a black screen, looping the last split second of audio for a short while, and after a moment the mouse cursor will appear with the waiting hourglass.

This forces me to bring up task manager and end the program and get the usual "Program not responding blah". Note that it's not a VSOD or any SOD !

This occurs roughly 50% of the time I alt+tab, which makes life difficult, to say the least.

It happens with every Valve FPS game I own, which is just about all of them (High five, fellow valve fanatics!). Additionally, when alt+tabbing does go smoothly, it's pretty slow, taking between 25-45 seconds.

Details of my laptop!

Model: G73JH-BST7
BIOS: 211 (heard there's a new one, but haven't been able to find the page!)
VBIOS: 012.020.000.032 ("How to fix your GSOD" one)
V Driver: 11.2

Even if there's no cure, this forum is awesome! Kudos to all the folks who provide us with all these tips, fixes and resources!

 

This is not a problem unique to G73. All Source games do this no matter what machine you run them on.

 

If u need to alt+tab out of the game rund it in window mode, not full screen, then it should work flawlessly.

 

Really? I've heard that alt tabbing takes a while even on good computers, but does freezing happen to everyone?

I've used a crappy acer before this and it never froze to my knowledge. It took like 2 full minutes to tab back in though. >:/

That's what I do with tf2, but that, too, is problematic as heck.

After alt+tabbing a couple of times the game acts weird; the window comes out of alignment with the screen, making textures choppy, AND alt+tabbing back into the window freezes the game for a few moments, like a normal alt+tab delay..

Thanks for the replies thus far. Do either of you, or anyone else, experience the same problems I'm facing? Do you just live with it?

 

I agree with you ... most of the times even if the game appears frozen ... they do come back with a time penalty though ... which can be over couple of minutes sometimes.

 

That's weird, I get the windows pop-up that tells me it's stopped responding. I'm aware that you can sometimes wait it out, but doesn't seem to be the case for me.

I've tried waiting it out, admittedly only with TF2. It didn't go back to normal.

Funnily, with Portal, it freezes (and stops responding) every time I alt+tab back in.

 

hmm thats interesting ... yesterday itself I was in tf2 and had a installation in background which incidently notified me in the midst of the game ... had to wait for almost a minute before i was able to resume the game back in tf2 ... though in spawn area(some body took me out in the interim)

 

try alt+enter instead of alt+tab

 

Well, better slow than crashing You've never experienced this problem? Portal seems to be the worst for me. Would you mind trying to alt+tab for that game, and seeing if it works?

Alt+enter didn't do anything in full screen mode.. Was I supposed to use that for window mode? I know it works in Bad Company 2.

Thanks for the responses thus far

 

lol ... never had alt tab situation in portal with ... but i just tested and it did crashed.

For tf2 never had this problem and tested again and it did worked again.

I did checked event logger and the error was in following module-

bin\vstdlib.dll

and the same dll is in tf2 ... so must be application specific ... might be wrong though will research on this later.

 

If you have a ati card, alt tabbing freezing on some games. Its a known issue that ati... my mistake, now amd hasn't addressed yet I think

 

Mine is gtx 460m ... so looks more like a valve problem with some games .

 

Do Windowed Mode No Borders Trust Me. Im Alt Tabbed Out Of L4d Right Now To Say This>

It Works!!!

 

Looks like I'll have to stick to that

Darn!

Interesting that it happens with the nvidia card as well..! But looks like there's no solution for now

I'd better take this question to the Steam user forums instead. Will report back if they have a solution!