How can I avoid wasting shots on zombies that are already dead, but haven't fallen in Left-4-Dead?

Question

In Left-4-Dead, zombies don't always fall immediately when killed (especially with a pistol or machine gun), but instead there is a delay. Since I've currently been shooting zombies until they fall, I've been wasting bullets. How do you figure out when to stop shooting and when to move onto the next zombie?

Answer

Here are a couple ideas.

Foremost, after a while you just get a "feel" for when a zombie is dead, or when he is still coming after you. You know about how much damage it takes. Note that different difficulties will require you to get different feels for this, so you'd need to play on the same one for a while.

Alternatively, you can switch your fire between a couple of zombies. A bullet usually stops or at least slows down a zombie, even if he is going to continue rushing at you. This gives you some time to deal with other zombies that may have gotten ahead in the rush due to this. You can always come back to the first zombie later on if you discover he's really still alive.

Note that you can't rely on their "animations" per se because of the ragdoll physics. If a zombie starts falling, he's dead, but quite often they take a full second or more before they actually begin to fall. You can't rely on a certain pose or position to indicate that a zombie is dead.

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