World-of-warcraft – WoW change Cmd and Ctrl

If you can run two monitors you can use wow in windowed mode and not need to 'alt-tab' or otherwise minimize the warcraft windows.

http://www.google.com/images?q=warcraft+windowed+mode

You can obviously do this without two monitors and have quick access to firefox (or itunes, etrade, etc). There is a performance hit with windowed mode, but it does have dynamic fps (frames per second) to degrade game play video quality to compensate.

Issue with this is that if you are using two video cards, some video cards introduce some issues when you drag windows between video cards or span windows between two different video cards. This isn't an issue with Windows7 any longer.

You also likely want to adjust the setting 'play sound in background' as when you wow window doesn't have focus it won't play sound. So when your surfing wowhead (or stackexchange) you won't notice chats, yourself being attacked, ready checks, etc otherwise.

To my knowledge Blizzard has not yet provided a way to view friend status from outside of their games. So you'll have to go with a 3rd party solution.

I use Steam to launch World of Warcraft. Steam will notify my friends when I launch a game, and vice-versa. Most of my friends also use Steam, which increases the value of Steam tremendously. There's little quite as satisfying as launching WoW and then seeing 4 more of your friends follow your lead. One downside to Steam is you have to own at least 1 game on the service to get the friend features.

Also, steam doesn't tell you what character they're on, but once you're in the game RealId can help figure that out really quickly. If you don't use RealId with these friends, there are a number of friend-synching addons you can use to keep track of friends across multiple characters on the same server/faction.

There are also a few alternatives to Steam (XFire?) for keeping track of what your friends are playing. A common thread across all of these is that all your friends will want to use the same program.