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Stupid Programmers
Jul. 27th, 2009 01:52 amHelping Lin set up various computers and organize the computer room.
Reinstalling the program that'd crashed the system and caused her to ship it up to me a couple of months back.
Found out that the program (Zoomtext) detects the presence of a second monitor, then asks "Do you wish to enable dual monitor support?"
If you answrer yes, it proceeds to set the secondary monitor to the same resolution as the primary monitor. Which screws up many systems.
Yes, it's stated in the docs (at the end of the section of dual monitors in the rather thick manual) that the monitors have to be set to the same resolution to use the dual monitor stuff.
But any reasonably careful programmer would have ewritten the code to notice that the monitors were *not* set to the same resolution,. noted that fact and asked the user about it.
It'd also be a good idea (assuming it is possible) to check and see if the video drivers think that's a valid resolution for the monitor before changing it.
Instead, we wound up with a ""monitor cannot display selected resolution, pleae reduce resolution to 1280x1024" on the secondary monitor, and (due to some bug or oththe er) the primary display no longer updating. Grr.
Further digging (on another system) brings up the news that this may be a known bug with "accessibility programs" using the Driver Chain Manager when running with Intel or ATI graphics cards that support dual monitors. Said note (on microsoft.com) promises a patch "soon". Only the page was last updated in June... 2008. Grrr.
Reinstalling the program that'd crashed the system and caused her to ship it up to me a couple of months back.
Found out that the program (Zoomtext) detects the presence of a second monitor, then asks "Do you wish to enable dual monitor support?"
If you answrer yes, it proceeds to set the secondary monitor to the same resolution as the primary monitor. Which screws up many systems.
Yes, it's stated in the docs (at the end of the section of dual monitors in the rather thick manual) that the monitors have to be set to the same resolution to use the dual monitor stuff.
But any reasonably careful programmer would have ewritten the code to notice that the monitors were *not* set to the same resolution,. noted that fact and asked the user about it.
It'd also be a good idea (assuming it is possible) to check and see if the video drivers think that's a valid resolution for the monitor before changing it.
Instead, we wound up with a ""monitor cannot display selected resolution, pleae reduce resolution to 1280x1024" on the secondary monitor, and (due to some bug or oththe er) the primary display no longer updating. Grr.
Further digging (on another system) brings up the news that this may be a known bug with "accessibility programs" using the Driver Chain Manager when running with Intel or ATI graphics cards that support dual monitors. Said note (on microsoft.com) promises a patch "soon". Only the page was last updated in June... 2008. Grrr.
