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Sick of Windows stealing your focus away? :idea:


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Posted

I've been annoyed as hell by this for a long time and didn't know what to search to fix it. Now I've found it :megaman:

Scenario: A human being is typing or doing something that requires focus on a certain window, but then they go to launch a new program. To stay productive, they go back and continue typing or whatever they were doing while the new program is loading. When the program is finished loading, it steals the focus away and whatever was being done is now being done in the new active program, which often has screws things up pretty bad.

http://www.dragondrop.com/windows/windows002.asp

Open your favorite registry editor.

Navigate to this key: HKEY CURRENT USER\Control Panel\Desktop.

In the right details pane, double click the item ForegroundLockTimeout.

In the value data field, set a hexadecimal value of 00030d40.

Click OK and close the registry editor. 

I found this site that shows what registry key to edit that prevents that from happening. Pretty safe and easy, and should have pretty good benefits on productivity. Cheers!

Posted

You can do the same with Tweak UI in XP, and set alternate behaviors like flashing the taskbar tab instead.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/Down ... rtoys.mspx

As well as a few other neat things like remove that curved arrow Windows puts at the corner of shortcut icons, make holding a mouse over a window give that window focus instead of needing to click it (would also help with the stealing focus issue), disable auto-play on removable media instead of just CDs, also disable it by drive letter (important for security), etc.

Dunno if there's anything like this for Vista or 7 though :(

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