Once again, I found myself having some pretty bad computer performance / usability issues over the last 2-3 weeks.  I’ve fixed it, but I at least want to document what went on in case someone else runs into it.

Although, now that I think about it - what’s the point?  The answer eventually was, in this order, A) update the drivers and B) install microsoft updates.  Since there’s nothing magical or mysterious about these fixes, and the steps I took are exactly what any techno-savvy support person would do, why would I waste your time with all the details?

So I’ll summarize that my laptop would resume from standby and not have any displayable screens.  Both the laptop screen and the external monitor would be blank.  Only a reboot would fix (to save data, I would remote desktop from another machine while on network).  I also had a short span of time where it WOULD show the startup page but it would not accept CTRL-ALT-DEL at all.

So instead of boring you, I’ll give you a joke.

A father asked his 10-year old son if he knew about the birds and the bees.

“I don’t want to know,” the child said, bursting into tears. “Promise me you won’t tell me.” 

Confused, the father asked what was wrong.

The boy sobbed, “When I was six, I got the ‘There’s no Easter Bunny’ speech. At seven, I got the ‘There’s no Tooth Fairy’ speech.

When I was eight, you hit me with the ‘There’s no Santa’ speech.
 
If you’re going to tell me that grown-ups don’t really get laid, I’ll have nothing left to live for.”

As someone who uses a dual-monitor setup most of the time, I’ve collected a bit of experience.  When I’m at work, my setup of choice is the laptop sitting opened up on a D-View stand with a 21″ CRT next to it.  This gives me dual-monitor functionality by using the laptop’s screen as one of the displays.  At home it’s pretty near the same, sans the D-View stand.  Even when I’m mobile and in a conference room temporarily, I will hunt for a 2nd monitor to set up if I’ll be there more than 30 minutes or so.

So far, I’ve written about how to fix the problem when an application displays on the wrong (or phantom) monitor display.  I’ve also penned a tip on how to avoid it in the first place.  I’ve given advice on how to find out why an application seems to “hang” if you’re typically running a dual-monitor setup.

Those are all great and good, but what if you want more power?

One handy little application that many people consider a “must have” is Ultramon.

Ultramon does many things that Windows won’t do for you, like controlling which monitor an application should use, perform mirroring for presentations, support multiple displays for screen savers (kiosk-style) and create pre-sets.  Probably the most convenient feature is the ability to create and save a DisplayProfile so that you can apply pre-configured scenarios that you run into most commonly.

While ultramon isn’t free, it is worth paying for if you find yourself struggling with the built-in support Windows offers.  TweakUI can do some things, but not enough.

I also have a complaint.  It involves something I call “Dual Monitor Hell”.  It’s a little area of space and time where your mouse gets stuck because there’s no trans-dimensional bridge to magically transport your cursor from one screen to another. 

What I want is for THE ENTIRE EDGE of each screen to be able to “catch the cursor” and move it onto the other screen.  Instead, however, if you get your mouse up in the corner shown above, it just sticks.  I think if you’re at the top of one screen and you move over, you end up at the top of the screen on the other display.

This may come in handy for those of you out there who use a laptop and frequently switch between standalone usage (single LCD display) to docked (dual-monitor) to standalone w/projector (dual-monitor) by going standby and/or undocking.

In general, Windows XP and the Dell Latitude equipment is very good about maintaining stability when docking and undocking. However, one annoying “feature” is when I’ve been using dual monitor for a while and then go to standalone/single and the application is still “displayed” on a phantom second monitor, or if the application “remembers” somehow to display on the second monitor.

When this happens to you, it acts like this — say you launch Word, and you see the Word task bar object down in the start bar, but when you click on it, it doesn’t come into focus on your screen. However, if you have window automations turned on (I think they’re default), you can actually see the window zooming and opening up for a quick second as it displays it on the 2nd monitor, which doesn’t exist. This happens a lot with error dialog boxes, say from Putty or something. IE, when I undock from a dual monitor setup and I have Putty on the 2nd monitor, Putty displays this “ok” dialog box when it loses network connectivity. Well, this “ok” dialog is on the phantom second monitor, so you can’t seem to close it from the start bar, and when you try to right-click on the task bar item it just does nothing. Very annoying.

So what you do is make the application have focus (ie, click on it in the task bar so that it’s looks like it
s ‘pressed’ like a button…) and do what it wants. In the case of Putty, it’s simply pressing Enter. However, most of the time, you don’t want to close the app, you just want it to display on the main monitor. So you can right-click on the item in the task bar and select “Move”. Then just hold down the right arrow key on the keyboard until it shows up, then press Enter. Now you can move the window around, double-click on the title bar to have it maximize on the primary monitor, or use it however you want.

I know most Office programs (Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint, etc) sometimes “remember” what screen they were on last, but it’s inconsistent and I can’t tell when it does remember and when it doesn’t. But hopefully this tip helps someone out someday.