Reboot

Computers are incredibly complex machines, and despite our increasing expectation on their abilities, they still have hiccups that cause a range of symptoms, from programs freezing, to the machine slowing down as a program or operation consumes vast amounts of the available processing power, and a myriad of other symptoms.

Most of the time, there is a simple fix once initial efforts to free the computer up have failed. Reboot.

The modern operating systems can run successfully for hours, days, even weeks at a time, but they all benefit from being shut down and restarted occasionally, even if no symptoms are obvious.

If you find that it becomes necessary to reboot too often, then further diagnosis is required, but in the first instance, if it seems that the computer has gone off to lunch, try getting it to restart. If at all possible however, get the computer to do the shut down (and restart), rather than just holding down the off button – that is a last resort, and can potentially cause further damage to the operating system (but is sometimes necessary). Allowing the computer to shut down the operating system, ending the rogue program (if that is what the problem is) as it does so is the best way to return it to a clean operating condition.

Controlling which screen is default for a program

I typically like to have a large amount of screen real estate – the more the merrier. To do so, I run a pretty large 23″ monitor (an Apple one in this case). Sometimes it is beneficial to have a second monitor as well running side by side, so I can have content on both, or one program running on one monitor and one on the other.

Usually, a program will open on the default monitor, but sometimes it would be better opening on the second. Also, and the reason for this post, the program seems to only open on the alternate monitor, requiring me to drag it over to my main one, and the normal tricks to prevent this were not working.

If you close a program while it is on the alternate monitor, it normally remembers both where it was, and the size it was the last time it was closed, so will default to that. What was happening in this case, is that despite everything that I tried, it wasn’t! Until I realised what I had done.

While the program was on the alternate monitor, I had maximised it, and the program had then become ‘locked’ to that monitor. By turning maximise off, and manually resizing it to the required dimensions and positioning it where required, it regained the ability to remember my preferences.

Of course, down track I will forget this again and will try to work out what I’ve done, but hopefully next time Google will give me this post and provide me with my own solution!!