Re: Dual Screens

  •  06-24-2008, 12:28

    Re: Dual Screens

    wabbit:
    View > Full Desktop, then layout what you need where you need it.


    I was wondering about this exact thing almost two years ago - it doesn't work well at all with my inverted-T arrangement of 4 monitors.

    Try View > Full Desktop on an inverted-T, you'll have a momentary heart attack - EVERYTHING but portions of the chart itself completely disappears.  All menus, controls, scroll/pan buttons, EVERYTHING is gone!  Novices would be helpless; if I hadn't known that double-clicking the window-name bar at the top would restore things I'd have been stuck since there are zero controls available when you try this.

    MS is incredibly lame in its obsolete user interface and window handling.  (Edit: I just rechecked the System Requirements in the 9.1 manual - the minimum is Win98 and a 166MHz processor, with "recommended" being WinXP and a Pentium III, introduced 9 years ago!  The "recommended" system processor is vintage 1999.)  With no ability to spawn independent child windows (even freeware has that), multimonitor systems are severely handicapped.  Dragging a window across more than one screen works, but its still one window - your controls are now miles apart from each other at the left/right side of the screen and you cover up everything spanned by the dragged/enlarged MS window.

    Now imagine trying it on an inverted-T arrangement - useless.  One kludgy way around it is to run another copy of MS in a virtual-machine window.  Works fine, but you have to be wary of data access/integrity issues.

    MS v10 sounds like a big, major upgrade number.  Polishing the interface after all these years would have been a welcome upgrade rather than the big nothing it turned out to be - hence my continued use of 9.1.  If the next upgrade is similarly useless I'll be starting to seriously investigate alternative, modern products.  I've been around long enough to have used WordStar, dBase II/III, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and other overwhelmingly-dominant products - all these, in their time, were by far the #1 product of their kind, used by everyone.  All of them, every single one, died and disappeared for a single reason - hubris.  The companies grew fat, happy, arrogant and lazy as they stopped improving their flagship product to be competitive against the newcomers.  All were dinosaurs and died out, replaced by nimble, better competitors that (like the mammals) started out small.

    Is RMO still "taking the world by storm"?



    When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed. - Ayn Rand
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