So I have always just kind of assumed it came with PC gaming territory as I've put up with it for about 5 years now and never even tried to understand why it happens, but I've finally said screw it and decided to try and end this crap. Now I know this happens to a lot of people and steam has no useful forums on this, surprisingly, just a lot of other people complaining about the same problem. Why in the world do games sometimes just randomly minimize when you're playing them? This can be a real problem for fighting games when online, or games like Dark Souls, or for that matter any game that doesn't pause. I know it's not a huge deal, but it's just aggravating. It seems to happen even more in Steam Big Picture Mode which is ironic as that is the time you REALLY don't want it to happen. It drives my daughter crazy when it happens and daddy needs to figure out a way to keep games from doing this crap.....if there is a way. Thanks ahead of time for suggestions.
This doesn't sound normal. Typically, if that sort of thing happens, it's usually a firewall or antivirus pop-up and I get that sorted right away. Sometimes instant messaging programs have a pop-up for people coming online and offline and you can accidentally click those if you use mouse in that area of the screen.
You're saying you've had this for five years? Is that the same computer/windows installation, or multiple machines through the years?
Multiple machines honestly. Then again I've only owned three different pc's in the past five years. Now that you mention it I do end up using Norton 360 on everything. I wonder if it's the culprit. I've had a couple of weirdness caused by Norton 360 thinking all PC's are laptops before. Norton does seem to be rather intrusive in many ways. I wish there was a way to just temporarily turn it off but there doesn't seem to be. Thanks for the answer by the way.
So I noticed that Norton has a silent mode that apparently turns off all tasks and pop ups. If I enable this every time I game do you think that would mitigate the problem? Also I wonder if that would boost performance in any games? I've got some pretty powerful hardware so I don't think it'd make that huge a difference but I wonder what you think?
Norton from my experience has done what you're talking about. It could also be some other background process. You could always go into MSConfig turn off all the un-needed services/start up items and see where that gets you.
Sorry for not getting back sooner, I'm a bit of a noob at navigating these forums so far.
I think you should be safe to not only disable, but uninstall the thing for testing purposes if you pull the network cable out. You could compare performance by running Fraps or some in-game performance benchmark before and after you do that, but it probably shouldn't be a big difference on a powerful machine.
I'm really not a security expert, so I could be dead wrong from safety perspective here, but I've stopped using Norton many years ago. It seemed to be becoming super bloated at the time. I'm using Avast now and seem to be ok.
I've found this is normally a certain program that causes this, in my case it was Samsung software that came with my SSD, got rid of it, never once had the problem again. I would venture to say that most likely its 99% a program causing it, just try to narrow it down.
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You guys were absolutely right and sorry for taking so long to answer. It was indeed Norton. I've since adjusted administrative settings heavily and reduced how much control over the machine I hand over to Norton. Not only is it more STABLE than it's ever been, it's also performing better, and it's stopped the minimizing crap. So learn from my mistake, avoid Norton for gaming rigs fellow tekkies!! Thanks again for the help guys! :D