I do technical support in an office with some employees who are not too technically-savvy. We run some windows based applications, which might take a few seconds to load up. Some of these users get impatient and click on the icon again and again, not waiting to see if the app has loaded. Eventually the computer tries loading the application for each time the shortcut was clicked on, leading to far too many instances of the application being open, and eventually freezing the whole machine.
We’ve tried educating them to be patient, but it doesn’t seem to work. I know that with Outlook there is a command line switch - recycled - that prevents it from opening another Outlook window if one is already open. Is there anything I can do to make a similar shortcut for an existing program? These users are on Windows 98.
The only thing I can think of is, if the application has an option to display a splash screen, turn on that option. That way the users will have something pretty to look at to tell them that the program is running. Option two: faster computers. Or you could redouble the education efforts - maybe corporal punishment could be considered?
Put a “wrapper” around the program (say, with Perl), so that when the program’s being started, it actually starts the Perl script instead, which first checks that no other instances of the program are running. (Somebody who knows Perl could do this for you in about 10 minutes.)
Alternatively, and possibly more broadly useful, is to write a program to run every hour, and note which programs have several running instances. At that point you could send a message to the user asking if they could close their applications briefly, for “system maintenance”. Then, after they’ve closed what they’re working on, kill all the instances of the application.
Whenever you fix a problem with their computer, tell them it was caused by them running multiple copies of programs. Then explain how they should be patient and try to figure out if a program is starting before clicking on it again.
I’m half-joking, but I’m half-not-joking. I bet it would help.
