A Laptop and Two Monitors Causes Missing Windows
May 11th, 2006At work I have two flat screens attached to the dock. I run Visual Studio, Outlook, Firefox and various application on either screen. I also have other applications like Skype which uses multiple windows for various chat session living on the separate screens. What I have discovered lately is that when I power down and take the laptop home the applications continue to act as if the second monitor is active. If I had the main Skype window hanging on the second screen and I open it with just the laptop it is no longer visible. And last night I was using a text editor I use because of the excellent search features, but during the day I had dragged the search dialog to the second screen and at home it is unusable. I would like to know what I can do to resolve this problem.
May 11th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
I used to have the same problem with an XSL editor. The app stored it's windows positions in the registry.
All I had to do was set the windows up on the primary monitor then export the relevant registry section. When I wanted to reset the window positions, I just merged the exported section before starting the app. HTH
May 13th, 2006 at 7:23 am
Ultramon from Realtime Software lets you easily switch between different display "profiles" , i.e. number of screens and resolution.
It can remember the window size and position for each monitor configuration and plays well together with Maxivista, the multi-monitor solution for multiple computers.
Ultramon is scriptable ( look at http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/scripts/ for some VB Scripts, but you should be able to use any scripting language ) .
It is also useful when you are using "remote desktop" to your machine with a different screen resolution, when you have to cycle through different screen resolutions to test drive your apllication layout or
when you "pivot" your TFT from time to time.
All this is also possible with free solutions like AutoIt (http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/index.php ) and a lot of scripting but I think Ultramon saves you a lot of time.