I’ve recently switched to Windows 2000 Professional at the office, and it’s doing something that drives me a little nuts. In every one of the several flavors of Windows I’ve used over the years when you launch an application it comes up as the active window.
Not so with my Windows 2000 at the office. If I launch an app, its window comes up, but no window is active. This is frustrating - I’ve got to go touch the app’s window with the mouse before I can use it.
It seems this must be addressed by a setting somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find it. Any of y’all know how to change this?
Delete windows and load Linux? All the options you want will be there, and if you don’t see one, at least you have the ability to write your own. BTW, why are you paying for software, when all you care about is using your computer?
I appreciate the thought, pal, but I was happily chugging along with NT when our corporate IT decided they could no longer live with their only NT system (which they don’t support). So, I got W2K (and they don’t support me, besides).
Linux is not an option anyway because my primary app has no equivalent in Linux world.
Anyway, the reasons this happens is that win2k suppresses code that makes a call to make a given window active. In windows 9X, this was a problem, because any “attention stealing application” could put itself right in the middle of your screen without you asking it to - and is especially annoying if you’re busy in a game or something.
Anyway… I do believe there is a registry option to turn this active window suppression off. I don’t know what it is offhand, but if no one knows the answer, I can look it up tomorrow.
SenorBeef, I had come to suspect that this would be something I’d have to hunt down in the registry - I was just hoping that there was an easier Control Panel alternative. Our IT department is simultaneously quite dictatorial (which I can understand) and ineffective.
hansel, my primary app is a 2D and 3D seismic interpretation package (that includes other modules for modeling and visualization) called The Kingdom Suite and is proprietary to Seismic Micro Technology. There are (not quite) competitive alternatives in Windows world, and the competing Unix packages run around 6-7 times the cost with less functionality. Nothing even vaguely similar exists for Linux or Macs.
I don’t do windows 2000 but this may be of some help. Review of TweakUI for Windows 2000 features. One feature setting sounds like it might be what you are talking about. http://www.tweak3d.net/tweak/win2k/
Review and download site
General Tab
“Under the general tab, there is a whole list of ‘effects’ that can be used by the operating system. Some of them are quite cool looking, but they hog system resources - and as such I recommend that you disable all of them. The only other setting in this panel is the prevent focus stealing setting. I really like this feature and I recommend that anyone who hates it when your email client (or whatever other popup program you have) takes over your screen when you are typing (causing you to either lose focus or even occasionally ok something you didn’t want it to) to enable it.”