ALT-TAB: THE WONDERFUL MULTI TASKING FEATURE

Ask any gamers you bump into in the cybercafé; they jolly well know what an Alt-Tab is. Whether you are twiddling your thumbs waiting for a raid to start in Defence of the Ancient, the temptation to Alt-Tab out of the game to switch to the Web browser is something we've all faced. However Alt-Tabbing is also a toss of the dice, but we gamers are gamblers and we still hit the Alt-Tab with iron wills and steely gazes at the ready. If things are fine, the windows do a bit of a flicker around in a voodoo-like fashion and bring us to the desktop. No harm done. We aren’t always that lucky. More often that not, the game will just crash on us. Also, there are times when lady luck spits in our eye, and the computer locks up completely, precisely the moment our steely gazes come into play.




A number of companies have been toiling away on in-game Web browsers to make Alt-Tabbing 2000-and-late. They reckon we shouldn't have to leave the game and leave it to luck if you want to check a few stuff on your hotmail. Programs like PlayXpert, Rogue, Xfire, and even Steam allows you to hit up the Web without leaving the all the action on the screen.

Such solutions are still new and consequently have their quirks but hold your tongue right there as they are already getting the hang of it. Do read on to learn about four of the more promising in-game browsing applications.

It is more than just a browser; PlayXpert serves as your one-stop hub to the outside world all within the confines of a game. Through PlayXpert's taskbar-like menu, you can access all sort of tools to cater all your needs. It is also rather convenient to browse the Web, play music, and chat over IM with your buddies right out of the initial install. This program has definitely has its broad compatibility and minimizes hits to performance by injecting its UI into the DirectX command stream as the information goes to the GPU.

When translated into English that means that PlayXpert does not trigger anticheat software and it doesn't need an update for new games or recently patched games.

There are quite a few widgets that are available for download on PlayXpert's Web site to further enhance the program. I’ll name you a few applications that include Gmail, Pandora, TeamSpeak, iTunes, and Google Gadgets, which unleashes many of Google's tools. Is installing widgets any difficult? Rest assured it is not at all complicated but the process isn't entirely straightforward so do pay attention to the readme. We had to rename the ZIP files we downloaded to .pxpwid files to get them to work. All the gadgets we tested worked as advertised after we renamed the files. We found the in-game IM support for Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, GTalk, and Xfire absolutely indispensible.

With a few tests, Counter-Strike slowed to a crawl, and interactions with PlayXpert felt like a breast stroke through molasses that’s with my humble Pentium 4. PlayXpert lived up to our dreams once we were on a quicker quad-core machine. I hate to admit that, we did lose a few frames, but the added functionality was well worth in games with a lot of downtime. PlayXpert also worked in just about every game we tried it in, although performance in some games did rather shabbily. Most of the time frame rates stayed close to default, but playing videos through YouTube killed them. The folks at PlayXpert mentioned that a forthcoming update to the program should address the issue.