How to use your second monitor while gaming

A second monitor should let you keep a guide, a stream or a chat open next to the game. In practice, clicking it tends to break the game in one of five ways, and each has its own cause and its own fix.

What goes wrong, and why

Every one of these starts the same way: the click on your other screen makes a different window the active one, and the game reacts to losing focus.

• The game minimizes. Exclusive fullscreen gives the display back to Windows.
• The sound cuts out. The engine mutes itself in the background.
• The game pauses or slows down. The engine stops its loop, or Windows throttles the background process.
• The controller stops working. The game ignores input while it is not in front.
• The mouse wanders off the game. In borderless mode, nothing keeps the cursor on the game's screen.

Free fixes first

1. Use borderless windowed mode instead of exclusive fullscreen. It stops the minimizing and makes every other fix possible.
2. Read the other screen without clicking it: turn on Scroll inactive windows when I hover over them in Settings, Bluetooth & devices, Mouse.
3. Move a windowed game between screens with Windows key + Shift + Left or Right arrow.
4. Check each game's settings for background audio and pause options before reaching for anything else.

When the free fixes are not enough

Most games offer one or two of these options, rarely all of them, and they have to be found again for every game you play.

How Second Screen Gaming fixes it

It catches a game while it runs and lists the fixes that game can take: configuration fixes written into the game's own files, and runtime assists its small tray agent applies while the game runs. Turn on what the game needs, once. The next time the game starts, the same fixes apply by themselves.