If you're running a game in Windows (7 in my case) people will alt-tab out of it. F3 is sooo buggy when it comes to this. Like buggier than most 3rd party games I've played. Bethesda really should be doing better than this.

Saying "oh don't alt-tab" is just silly. The game shouldn't crash just because I want to check my email.

Anyone have any tips for getting the alt-tab behavior to work better?

Also, I couldn't search for "alt tab" because those two words are both under 4 characters. That's so dumb.

Try hitting esc button to get to the menu screen then alt tab...maybe it will take some of the resource load off? Just an idea =)

That's because Bethesda games generally have very poor memory management. No way out of it...

*shrug* Been that way since Day One. Sad, and even more sad that they never addressed it. Or the random crashes...

Try running the game windowed? :shrug: Also I keep hearing about these crashes but my game never crashes if I keep Firefox open and then alt-tab (I'm using XP SP3). Nothing else comes to my mind.

I will try that. I've tried alt-tabbing to FF and that hasn't helped.

It's not a memory issue, I've got 8GB, never go over 50% usage.

I've tried hitting ESC first, but that doesn't seem to help. Or it does seem to help, but only by making it not crash twice in ten, instead of one in ten.

What I've done is keep a window open, like your web browser, before launching the game. This helps switch to an open window when you Alt-Tab. Works 95% of the time for me.

I can get it up to about 97-98% by doing this:

having notepad or some other small window open

Hit escape for the menu, the ~ for the console

Alt-tabbing to the window, try to be back as soon as possible



And you might want to quicksave just in case.

I've found that if I bring up the Pip-Boy and then hit Esc before Alt/Tab that I rarely crash the game out. Not 100% - but much more stable than just Alt/TAb

in my case, the game doesn't crash if you alt-tab, but it minimises and you can't maximise it any more, if I switch back to fallout, it stays minimized, so the only thing I can do is crash it through the task manager and restart the game. very annoying, if you need to check something on fallout wiki or in the toolset while playing

Have a window open. Whenever I leave a window open, it switched to that window, and that doesn't happen.

I've tried all of the fixes above. The only one that helped was hitting ESC then ~. But even then, it only helped a little bit -- I think there was one or two times that I expected a crash but didn't get one.

Pretty lame Bethesda, pretty lame. I can't think of any game I've played this year that had this much of a problem with switching to the desktop. And in a GOTY edition no less. Bethesda might be good at making games, I just wish they were good at making software.

A lot of people, including me, think that too.

I tried this a couple of minutes ago and it worked, several times.

When playing a game, save.
Esc, Quit, Main Menu.
Alt-Tab out to a window THEN immmediately alt-tab back to the game.
Do your browsing etc.
Alt-Tab back into the game.
Continue.

My suspicion was that the alt-tab issue was with the Havok engine. Seems to be accurate. I'll report back if this little scheme stops working at some point. It's a little annoying but less annoying than having to kill the game off manually with the task mgr.

Somehow alt-tabbing out of the game then immediately back makes it work better for me in Win7.

That's exactly what I do, and it works perfectly for me.

I wonder if you're also running Windows 7?

Anyway, I've found that it fails about 33% of the time after trying it 20 times or so.

Nope, Windows Vista.

Why do you need to Alt Tab 20 times?

Collecting all the bobbleheads. And looking up random stuff on the wiki, like the keller family stuff.

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=45

Try this.

I use Steam to run FO3 so I can browse and searching falloutWiki without needing to do alt-tab. if you added your game whatever is it, in steam game list you will be able to open mini browser in-game and that's really helpful. you will only need to run the game through steam client.

Excuse me for resurrecting an old post, but having gone back to the game again only recently and finding this same annoying issue, I've been hunting around for a solution ever since and found something that seems to be solving this problem for me, at least on one machine.
I suspected that not being able to maximise again properly might be something to do with the Games for Windows Live, so tried this, and it appears to work for one of my PC's I play Fallout 3 on:

Open up Windows Live in the game (default key = Home) before Alt tabbing.

It maybe a coincidence, but ever since I've been doing this, like I say, for one of the PC's, it's been fine ever since, where previously both had the problem.

NB: Both PC's are running Windows 7 64bit, but of course there are other factors involved (e.g. the problem free one is lower spec, and running Fallout 3 at minimum graphics settings), I'll let you know if I spot anything else.

Edit...
Damn it, it's happening again, takes longer now (doesn't do it every time I alt-tab any more) but it's still happening, even after disabling GFWL (http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1086).

Live with it, it's just one of the quirks of the game engine. Oblivion had issues with alt-tabbing as well. There's even a warning about this in the Fallout read-me file.