Keeping large programs in memory

[AmberClad]

Are there any potential drawbacks in ALT-TABing large programs and keeping them in memory in the background indefinitely while you go about doing something else?

Does it take use any additional system resources (other than the amount of memory used for the program itself)? Does it cause any instability, especially with the graphics resolution shifting?

I guess I'm also a bit paranoid that it's going to result in a memory leak if the program is badly coded.

 

[dawks]

Generally the biggest concern might be if a program is accessing hardware/drivers deeply, and might not like ALT+TAB. I know on my system if I try to ALT+TAB out of a game, the game freezes up. It doesn't lock the computer, but I have to kill the game in taskmanager. Some games might lock the computer if they can't handle ALT+TAB. I will also note that others can ALT-TAB in and out of some of the same games that give me a problem, so often times it can be hardware/driver specific.

Another problem might be a memory leak like you said. But if your running Windows 2000 or better, you should be able to bring up task manager and kill the process if it becomes instable and the NT kernel should be able to recover without a reboot. That being said, you should save open files before you switch programs to prevent possible data loss.

The NT kernel works very well. Most instability in Windows is caused by poor hardware, poorly coded drivers, or poorly coded software.

 

[Nothinman]

I guess I'm also a bit paranoid that it's going to result in a memory leak if the program is badly coded.

So what if it does? Worst case scenario is that you notice one app is using a ton of memory after awhile and you have restart it occasionally.

Besides the fact that I hate managing multiple layered windows I never exit anything unless I absolutely have to do so. And I avoid the layered windows problem by using multiple desktops, sadly there's no decent implementations for Windows.