I have what is probably a pretty lame issue with Windows XP, which drives me absolutely batcrap everyday when I get to work.
I have about nine programs that I log into at work for different things, like terminal clients, our email server, etc. These things load in succession. What ends up happening is they will load on top of each other. My computer takes a full 4 minutes to load all of these programs because they live on a network server and it takes a long time to access it in the morning.
My beef and question is this: How do I get them from loading on top of each other? For example, I am typing my password and login information to one, the second loads on top of it and takes away my cursor from it, and then I click back on the first one, the third one pops up…
Very minor issue, I know, but when it happens on a normally stressy day, maybe you can imagine how it would tick you off.
ETA: I need these programs to load in a particular order, and they all need to be running. My computer is really good here at work, it can swing all the programs being run at the same time, its just the huge loading process, which I have to do about 4 or 5 times a day minimum.
They run these flash updates about every two hours, I don’t know what they are, but we have to do a full reboot to get them to load up into our instance.
It has something to do with the synching up of this archaic software we run from the Department of ED.
I have the same problem, and I consider it the stupidity of the programs. Future developers take note, don’t interrupt what the user is doing when you load your program and go “HEY LOOK AT ME NOW!”
What you need is an “always on top” option which you can select for whatever window you are working on. I googled it and there seem to be some solutions scattered around. Try googling the words: XP always on top
I’ve used Linux (kde) for 10 years and it’s always had that option. I’m amazed that it’s not built in to Windows.
Ha yeah. Internet Explorer really annoys me with this. The other browsers are quite happy loading up in the background, but start IE and every few seconds it comes back saying “HEY LOOK HERE I AM!” This is particularly annoying when IE is loading web page that I know will take some time, and I want to do something else in the meantime.
Just put all your programs in; if they accept login info from the command line, do it. Start the batch file, go get your morning coffee or take your AM BM and when you come back, they’re all running and ready for login.
To be fair, this is something that the OS should disallow in the first place, and I’m amazed that it still hasn’t become an obvious option in either Windows or Mac OS. It is an option in some flavors of Linux, but it doesn’t always completely work in my experience.
Popups to alert users to an event are one thing, but they should appear in one of the corners, and they should never steal focus. Stealing focus of the user’s input can lead to potentially catastrophic results when buttons are unknowningly clicked.
For what it’s worth, the other basic feature that I’ve wanted for years is to have independent volume controls for each program. Yeah, developers should put an option in to control the volume or mute their programs, but failing that, the OS should let you do it for them. I’d like to see the same thing on a per-tab basis for browsers.