Lee's Blog

I haven’t commented on this lately — not because I don’t hate Vista, but because the routine of getting it to recognize the two monitors has gotten — well — routine. However, as I was typing the prior post, Vista did something new! and exciting!

In fact, Vista shut down both monitors and refused to bring them back. No amount of plugging, unplugging, and swearing was able to fix the problem, and I finally had to shut down and restart. Fortunately WordPress saves regularly, so I only lost a couple of sentences.

This is getting old …

Thursday night it bluescreened when I tried to put it to sleep. Friday morning, after I sorted out the monitors, it wanted to update Windows and also, to my great surprise, the video drivers. Oh, joy, maybe they’ve fixed the video issues!

So it updated. And we went back to a single monitor, but this time we had 640×480 and 16 colors. (Note to self — nothing in Vista looks good at 640×480 and 16 colors). Nor could I easily fix it. I tried the reboot cycle but that wasn’t enough; I had to shut down the machine entirely and do the whole plug and unplug routine. Also it took two rounds of “safely remove hardware”. The first one straightened out the resolution on one monitor and allowed me to use the second monitor (with 640×480 resolution); the second one straightened out the second monitor.

Snarl!

I haven’t commented on Vista lately, but not for lack of reason to comment on Vista. So let’s see …

I went to Oklahoma for a month, leaving my computer in New York turned off. When I came back and fired it up, it only recognized one monitor (natch) but even that one monitor was dimmed down to the point where I could scarcely read it. I reset the brightness and contrast to factory defaults, tried two other monitors, but couldn’t undim it. The trouble was in Vista. Apparently it was not happy at being left alone so long. After a couple of shut down and restart cycles, it went back to normal brightness. So I just needed the usual routine to force it to recognize the existence and resolution of the two monitors.

So now I had my monitors back — all is well, right? Well, no. Its next trick was to turn off the left hand monitor several times a day. It didn’t stay off long at first, so I just ground my teeth a little and waited for it to come back. But then, I guess since I wasn’t responding to it, it got a little bolder and started resetting the resolution of the left hand monitor to something the monitor couldn’t handle. Attempting to change the resolution of the left hand monitor caused the right hand monitor to go to 800×600. And stay there. Until I shut the machine down and restarted. It was especially thrilling the times it did this while I was working from home, because the Remote Desktop bar was on the left hand side and therefore invisible, making it somewhat difficult to close things up properly.

Our IT people in Oklahoma were impressed when I casually advised them how to move an invisible window from a dead monitor to its live neighbor (press Alt-space, M, right arrow a couple of times, hold down the left mouse button and drag until the window moves into the live monitor). I didn’t expound on how much practice I had at this.

For some reason, Vista has been behaving itself lately. It’s only switched itself to 800×600 on a single monitor twice this week, and both times I was able to straighten it out without shutting the machine down. Perhaps it is happy because I have been more responsive to its tantrums.

Yesterday I came home and found that my computer had spontaneously reverted to one 800×600 monitor.  Thank you very much, Vista.  At least it was fixable without plugging and unplugging.

Then, I put the computer to sleep just before going to bed (since it won’t sleep spontaneously).  After a while, I realized that its little light was still blue instead of orange, which indicated that it wasn’t asleep.  I turned the monitors back on (it allows the non-VGA monitor to go to power save but not the VGA monitor so I have to turn the monitors off manually too — sigh), and discovered that it had blue-screened.  Oh, thank you very much, Vista.  It wouldn’t turn off, either.  I finally shut it down by turning off the power at the power strip.

At least it restarted with no more than the usual hassle this morning.

Did I mention that since the last update, which prompted the latest (but regrettably not last) shut-down, which prompted the latest battle with Vista over the monitors, the computer doesn’t go to sleep anymore?

It doesn’t go to sleep. The power settings are unchanged; it still runs the screensaver and turns off the monitors on schedule, but it doesn’t go to sleep. I have to remember to put it to sleep manually.

I really appreciate these automatic updates, Microsoft, really I do.

Okay, I officially hate Windows Vista again.

Last night Vista wanted to shut down and install some updates. Oh, all right, go ahead, leave me alone. So it shut down. And when it started up, it had only one monitor.

My fault, I left both plugged in when I turned it on. So I unplugged the VGA plug and rebooted. I went through the steps (I thought), and got everything in order (I thought). I logged onto the office computer through remote desktop … and it’s on only one monitor. It knows it’s supposed to have the higher resolution, so it has scrollbars. When it scrolls it doesn’t update correctly and I can’t read the text. I can’t work this way.

So I unplugged the VGA plug and rebooted. I went through the steps, and when the “safely remove hardware” didn’t immediately straighten out the monitors, I clicked it again. Bad move. The VGA monitor straightened out, but the other monitor went bye-bye, and nothing I could do, including plugging and unplugging, would bring it back. Oh, and did I mention that after a couple of tries at getting the other monitor back, the VGA monitor went to 800×600 and refused to go any higher?

Go through the routine again: shut down, unplug the VGA, boot up, set up one monitor, plug in the other, click “safely remove hardware” — and the second monitor goes away. Swear profusely.

Shut down again (this is the fourth time) , unplug the VGA, boot up, set up one monitor, walk away and swear for a while, giving it time to settle (I hope). Plug in the VGA monitor, set it up (with the wrong resolution), walk away and swear for a while, giving it time to settle. Cross fingers and toes, click “safely remove hardware”. When everything settles down, reset monitors. That works. Cross fingers and toes, log into office computer. Everything works.

And it only took two hours!

Something weird is going on here.  Norton wanted to reboot last night, and it was late, so I said, fine, go ahead, I’ll sort it out in the morning.

But it didn’t require sorting out! Both monitors and the network connection were online this morning, just like you’d expect with a real operating system!

The new computer slept through the night, and awakened with two functioning monitors and a functioning network card. In fact, I think it is fully functional. That I regard this as an event worthy of blogging is a measure of how unreliable Vista is.

So, this computer came with Norton, which I haven’t removed yet because so far it hasn’t appeared to cause any harm. Naturally, as soon as I got the monitors set up properly, Norton wanted to reboot. Okay, fine, grit my teeth and let it go. I experimented with the boot process this time, and I find that the docking station can be dispensed with. The process now is:

• Unplug the VGA connection.
• Boot.
• Set up the (single) monitor.
• Plug in the VGA monitor.
• Set up the two monitors. The resolution will be wrong on the VGA monitor.
• Click “safely remove hardware”.
• When the monitors settle down, change the resolution on the VGA monitor.

Painful as this is, it certainly beats last week’s routine, which involved considerably more swearing.

I forgot to mention that I found a way to prevent the network adapter from going bye-bye: Vista has a setting that allows it to turn off the adapter to save power. Apparently it is then too stupid to turn it on again. I have that setting turned off, obviously.

The saga of the two monitors continues …

I tried plugging in the docking station that I was using to allow the laptop to control an extra monitor. It actually works, but doesn’t support the resolution of the monitor. Although, in some sense it was better than the video card. Maybe. The video card was maxing out at 1440×900 and the docking station was maxing out at 1280×1024. But I kind of like the wider screen rather than the deeper screen.

So after looking at that for a while, I unplugged the monitor from the docking station and plugged back into the video card. Now we’re back to 1440×900. So for some reason I idly clicked on the “safely remove hardware” icon. The screens go insane, bits and pieces of the image appear on first one and then the other, and finally the whole image moves to the right hand screen, leaving the left blank. On a hunch, I moved the mouse to the right and determined that the left hand screen had become the secondary screen. So I went in to reorganize the monitors again and surprise! the full resolution is now available on both monitors.

I’m making a note of this in case the video falls apart again. The sequence is:

• Boot with the monitor plugged into the docking station;
• Get the monitors set up correctly with the docking station;
• Unplug from the docking station and plug into the video card;
• Get the monitors set up correctly (more or less) with the video card;
• Click on “safely remove hardware”.
• Rearrange the monitors again.

We’ll see if things have settled down and will stay stable through a sleep cycle. In the meantime, I have spent four hours fighting with Vista instead of working on Distributed Proofreading.