On another window of my desktop is a frozen Yahoo! window containing a marvelous, long email I want to send. It responds to no amount of clicking, typing or attempted scrolling. I can’t even copy the text to paste it elsewhere.
I don’t wanna build the message from scratch. What can I do to “thaw” the thing, or save the text?
About all you can do at this point is Alt-print screen to copy the window and paste it into Paint or some other program so that you don’t lose the text. Of course, you’ll only get the text that’s actually visible in the window – anything that’s scrolled off the edge is lost forever.
well you can open it up, hit “print screen/sysrq” in the upper right of your keyboard, open up paint, copy paste, save as .jpg, and attach it to another email.
If you save an image of it, you can then do something called OCR, which stands for Optical Character Recognition. Since this text is perfect (no smudges or bad handwriting, obviously) you should have no problem with it. I don’t know if you can get free OCR programs online, but good luck.
Office 2003 (and maybe 2002) has a simple, built-in OCR applet that should work like gangbusters in this scenario.
What O/S are you using? If you are using 98 or Me, can you do a ctrl/alt/del and end task on other background running process, and see if the Yahoo window becomes responsive? (Do NOT end task on explorer)
Actually, depending on the exact symptoms, I’d highly recommend ending the explorer task. The task manager sends a kill signal to the process, telling it to shut down. About 20 seconds later, if the process is still running, a window saying the program is not responding, do you wish to Wait, Cancel, or End the process will appear.
If you do this with Explorer, you’ll get the shutdown option box. Hit cancel on this. 20 seconds later, the task manager will offer you the three options. Choose to end the task. Your menu bar will disappear, along with the icons on your desktop. If the OS isn’t too far gone, Windows will realise it needs explorer running, and re-spawn it for you. (Note that all the icons in your system tray will stay gone (though the programs themselves stay running), and you’ll lose any file-system-type explorer windows you had open. Oh well).
If explorer was the flaky one, this could buy you a bit more time with your running programs.
Really?
Your first line of tackling this would be to end task on Explorer?
To each their own solutions I suppose?
My advice still stands.
I’d end task on everything but the offending Yahoo page, systray and explorer, in hopes of unfreezing the Yahoo page.
I’ve done something similar to what she said, I think. It worked.