Odd behavior when switching monitors

[amtravco001]

I have a PowerBook, and separate Apple Cinema displays at home and at
work. I run Word 2004 at work, then (with Word running) unplug the
monitor. All apps move onto the PB screen. Then I put PB to sleep, come
home, wake from sleep, and plug into Cinema display at home. Apps move
back onto big screen. But windows in Word are now confused: Sine they
are PB-sized, I try to drag them to the full height of the Cinema
display, but they won't go all the way down to the top of the dock -
they sort of snap back to a shorter height. Worse, if I start
scrolling, their redrawing is all messed up, with lines repeated and
sort of on top of each other. A restart of Word fixes it. This started
with Tiger, was OK with Panther.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Yeah, this is really an extreme case of "brave" user work-practices

I know, I know, computers have gotten so good now that we just expect things
like this to "just work". But five years ago, switching the monitors on a
running application would have been considered "extremely brave", and
switching to and from a dual monitor setup would have been considered
death-defying.

Ten years ago, "sleeping" an operating system with applications still
running would have been considered equally death-defying.

Which is why I never do it. I close down all of my applications before
sleeping the computer.

Eventually, they will get around to coding Word to check every so often to
see if the monitor has changed, and they will code Tiger to announce to all
applications when the monitor changes.

Until that happens, basically you're asking too much of the computer.

Sorry

I have a PowerBook, and separate Apple Cinema displays at home and at
work. I run Word 2004 at work, then (with Word running) unplug the
monitor. All apps move onto the PB screen. Then I put PB to sleep, come
home, wake from sleep, and plug into Cinema display at home. Apps move
back onto big screen. But windows in Word are now confused: Sine they
are PB-sized, I try to drag them to the full height of the Cinema
display, but they won't go all the way down to the top of the dock -
they sort of snap back to a shorter height. Worse, if I start
scrolling, their redrawing is all messed up, with lines repeated and
sort of on top of each other. A restart of Word fixes it. This started
with Tiger, was OK with Panther.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Elliott Roper]

Yeah, this is really an extreme case of "brave" user work-practices

I know, I know, computers have gotten so good now that we just expect things
like this to "just work". But five years ago, switching the monitors on a
running application would have been considered "extremely brave", and
switching to and from a dual monitor setup would have been considered
death-defying.

Ten years ago, "sleeping" an operating system with applications still
running would have been considered equally death-defying.

Which is why I never do it. I close down all of my applications before
sleeping the computer.

Eventually, they will get around to coding Word to check every so often to
see if the monitor has changed, and they will code Tiger to announce to all
applications when the monitor changes.

Until that happens, basically you're asking too much of the computer.

Sorry

Chicken! I leave Word running for weeks if not months, with at least
one sleep per night.

Heh! I do a fair bit of that too, except I don't bother unplugging the
monitor before sleeping, and plug in the other before waking.

Doing it your way, I can reproduce your symptoms.
However, I found a trick to get it back OK without quitting Word.
Hop into System preferences -> Displays. Change the pixels to something
horrid and little, fettle the windows, change the resolution back
again. Viola!
(It is my solution for those days when Word jams itself under the menu
bar too.)

 

[Tim Murray]

I have a PowerBook, and separate Apple Cinema displays at home and at
work. I run Word 2004 at work, then (with Word running) unplug the
monitor. All apps move onto the PB screen. Then I put PB to sleep, come
home, wake from sleep, and plug into Cinema display at home. Apps move
back onto big screen. But windows in Word are now confused: Sine they
are PB-sized, I try to drag them to the full height of the Cinema
display, but they won't go all the way down to the top of the dock -
they sort of snap back to a shorter height. Worse, if I start
scrolling, their redrawing is all messed up, with lines repeated and
sort of on top of each other. A restart of Word fixes it. This started
with Tiger, was OK with Panther.

I have to agree with John, in that this is brave. While monitor swapping
usually works for me, those times when things screw up isn't worth the
hassle, so I typically shut things down to make it as easy on the computer (I
have a PowerBook too) as possible.

 

[amtravco001]

Well, every app except Word works fine as I switch monitors. One clever
OS X feature: At work my powerbook is to the left of the monitor, while
at home it's to the right. OS X "remembers" which side the monitors are
on. It can evidently tell them apart.

Except for Word (and, in fact, even Word worked fine before I upgraded
to Tiger), I essentially never shut down. I've gone for months
switching monitors every day. So generally the system is pretty robust
in this regard.

I tried Elliot's "switch resolution" trick and it worked fine the first
few times, but just now failed and I had to quit and restart Word.

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

Except for Word (and, in fact, even Word worked fine before I upgraded
to Tiger), I essentially never shut down. I've gone for months
switching monitors every day. So generally the system is pretty robust
in this regard.

Tiger - or some applications in it (I suspect Safari as a major one) leak
memory tremendously. In Panther (10.3.8 and 10.3.9, but pretty well as far
back as I can remember) I could leave everything open for weeks or months.
In 10.4.1 I have to either reboot every 2 or 3 days or - I discovered
recently - quit all apps at night. There's something about leaving them open
overnight (who knows? maybe to do with Apple's clean up schedules) that
slows down some apps hugely. Much worse than Word are all my AppleScript
editors, for example. After being open all night it takes them 90 seconds or
so to compile or open a long script - Script Editor, Script Debugger, Xcode
are all the same, so it must be AppleScript itself. Quitting and relaunching
them (no need to log out or reboot) fixes it. Logging and rebooting makes
even more RAM available (as per Activity Monitor). I'd guess that by 10.4.3
or 10.4.4 or so this should be fixed.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[Elliott Roper]

Tiger - or some applications in it (I suspect Safari as a major one) leak
memory tremendously. In Panther (10.3.8 and 10.3.9, but pretty well as far
back as I can remember) I could leave everything open for weeks or months.
In 10.4.1 I have to either reboot every 2 or 3 days or - I discovered
recently - quit all apps at night. There's something about leaving them open
overnight (who knows? maybe to do with Apple's clean up schedules) that
slows down some apps hugely. Much worse than Word are all my AppleScript
editors, for example. After being open all night it takes them 90 seconds or
so to compile or open a long script - Script Editor, Script Debugger, Xcode
are all the same, so it must be AppleScript itself. Quitting and relaunching
them (no need to log out or reboot) fixes it. Logging and rebooting makes
even more RAM available (as per Activity Monitor). I'd guess that by 10.4.3
or 10.4.4 or so this should be fixed.

I can confirm that I am seeing something similar. top appears to show
VM increasing over several days. I rebooted a couple of days ago
because VM and my music collection were fighting for disk on my
Powerbook. I got about 4GB back from swapfiles. (I got another 5 GB
back from hiding all my Bach Cantatas on another disk.) I have not yet
worked out who is causing it. I'm expecting a 10.4.2 update any day
now. (rumour sites say so) Firefox and Safari have the biggest numbers
in the VM column

amtravco001: I found another trick:- Sometimes simply trying to do a
save-as slides a jammed document back into view. Grab it while you can,
then cancel the save-as. Word is not the only application that jams
windows under the menu bar on 2 monitor set-ups, but it does it far
more frequently than all the others. TexWrangler is one such.
(I became famous for having Word's help jammed under the main menu bar
for nearly a year. I didn't know it had a close button!!)

 

[Clive Huggan]

And if you have Macaroni running, the problem might persist???
Dear all,

Here's an upside to running Word [2004] on two monitors (I have a 20" LCD
display next to my 17" PowerBook; OS 10.3.8) -- namely a second set of
toolbars on the second screen:

(As a preamble: in the Normal template I create toolbars containing only the
buttons I want, taken from Word's Standard and Formatting toolbars (that way
I can transfer my customizations via Organizer for backing up, whereas you
can't do that with the default toolbars). Then I close the default toolbars
once-off.)

To put a second set of toolbars on the external screen, I duplicated the
toolbars -- named them "[toolbar name] 2" -- and positioned them on that
screen.

When the external screen isn't hooked up, Word knows it isn't there and the
second set of toolbars doesn't show up.

In practice, because I sometimes want every spare millimetre of vertical
space, I also have a button that hides/shows this second set.

PS: I'm cautious about disconnecting "live", like John McGhie.

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is at least 7 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
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