Author Topic: Booted To Desktop (Read 241 times)

xtyger · « **on:** March 15, 2007, 03:24:24 PM »

I have a fairly regular problem with the game minimizing on me right in the middle of play. Pop! all of the sudden the game's minimized and I have to click on it to bring it up and wait for the graphics to load again. I'm still in the game but, as you can imagine, I've been killed numerous times because of this when I'm in a fight or diving and such.

Anyone know of a way to figure out what application is doing this? I suspect it's another program running behind the scenes on my computer, most likely my firewall. I realize I could just turn off the firewall and see how that works but I'm almost paranoid, having seen how many times something has tried to access my computer on the firewall's log.

They do have a Game Mode you can run the firewall on, though. I'm still a bit paranoid about that. Anyone know just how effective the Zonelabs Firewall Game Mode is?

Then again, what if it's NOT the firewall doing this?

Blagard · « **Reply #1 on:** March 15, 2007, 03:44:20 PM »

The techincal guys and Gals will give you some good advice on this, but I would add that you can also get an application to shut down unnecessary processes so that you can play AH with less resources being taken up at that time. I have been using FSAutoStart and found it dead easy to use for a free bit of software. I have it set to restart the things it shuts down when I have finshed with Aces High.

Denholm · « **Reply #2 on:** March 15, 2007, 07:01:49 PM »

You should run an Anti-Virus scan here:
http://safety.live.com
It's free, and only takes about 1-2 hours depending on the size of your HD. Also, you shouldn't run any applications in the background while the scan is running.

Afterwards, you should consider getting Lavasoft AdAware to check for any spyware you might have. Usually SpyWare that gets onto your system causes these types of things. They usually cause pop-up ads to be generated randomly, yet sometimes they will just cause applications to minimize or exit completely.

http://www.lavasoft.com

xtyger · « **Reply #3 on:** March 15, 2007, 08:51:35 PM »

Thanks all, but I'm not sure that's the problem, per se.

I did a sypware check on the hard drive and it found five spyware. At least some of those are programs I'm aware of, including the program that is included with my DSL connection.

NOT · « **Reply #4 on:** March 15, 2007, 11:08:04 PM »

had this problem before too, look at process list in task manager. find any process that has "sched" in the name, example-"jusched.exe", disable it.
also, as was posted before programs like FSAUTOSTART, work great to shut down processes.

NOT

Schatzi · « **Reply #5 on:** March 16, 2007, 03:14:28 AM »

This is caused by another application becoming active.

It could be spyware/malware/adaware type of applications, so get some antiviral agent and do some serious hunting.

It could also be some "normal" windows application like autoupdaters and scheduled tasks (AV) etc etc....make sure you dont have any of those enabled. Id recommend to work through the stickies Skuzzy has posted in this forum, about what you can safely live without. Check your task manager processes tab, in the lower left corner it says how many processes are currently running. A clean Windows install usually has 19-21, when im done with installing all my basic stuff I usually end up with around 32. Depending on how many "muscles" your system has, it can handle that no problem.

Another thing to check is your CPU usage (task manager). With no open programs, it should sit idle between 0-2%. Anything over 4 is an indication of some spyware/malware doing "its job" in the background.