2-boxing, same system: Hardware Destruction?

Hola, Amigos,

I dual-box two sets of characters: a priest/druid and a 2-shammy combo. I use Keyclone, and run both accounts on the same machine. Its worked like a champ...all the way to 62 with no issues whatsoever.

Last night things broke down. I have ALT-TAB combo keybound to my G15. I typically just hit that when I need to quickly switch between the two toons. My question for ya'll is this: does alt-tabbing excessively, or switching between the two quickly, constantly and for long periods of time, put undue strain on my system?

I have an outstanding (for me) rig: XPS 710 with 4gigs ram and an nvidia 8800gtx. The video card went kapoot last night...Dell is overnighting a new one to me now (thank you extended warranty), but I sincerely hope my new multibox obsession didn't break my PC.

Any thoughts or comments? Thanks in advance. And forgive me if this is the wrong spot to ask. ;(

ALT - Tabbing should not kill or damage your videocard in anyway. I always ALT - TAB and have done so for years and right now I'm Alt - Tabbed to this forum. ;)

Yeah alt-tabbing wont (or shouldnt) effect the pc performance. With the failure of the vid card it sounds like you may have some hardware issues. Might check for excessive heat buildup that may be causing problems.

Actually, and i'm not sure if this has been fixed. But blizzard has even said that a memory leak appears accosionally while alt-tabbing in/out of WoW

Download Speedfan to monitor your temps and do ctrl+alt+delete to watch the memory consumption of each wow. If you see it getting excessive(Just compare it to when you 1st log in) then close both WoWs and restart them. If your temps get too high(Basicly over 60 degrees is getting bad) restart your wows or try to turn your fan speed's up

I had a similar problem - I have almost exactly the same hardware as you down to the graphics card. However it wasn't my graphics card that blew, it was my lovely 24" Dell monitor. Almost a week after I set up the maximizer to use 2 screens, it pooped out. Of course I used that "opportunity" to buy myself 2-22" monitors as a replacement. I didn't alt-tab; I simply used two windows on the same screen. Warranty had expired too :-(

Now I have 1 character per monitor & things seem to be working fine for now.