Right/left-expanding & Dropdown Menus Suddenly Open In Random Directions.
Dec 12, 2009
A typical Windows multiple-choice menu, e..g. right/left-expanding or dropdown; for example try right-click on empty desktop area and select View or SortBy, which in turn also leads to other menus. Or in Internet Explorer click View-->Textsize, zoom, etc. Or any other expanding type of menu. Well, upto today it was predictable - next menu subwindow would popup on the right side if there's space between it and display's rightmost edge (or on left if there's more space on the left). But now they all open at random sides, one menu opens on left from the mouse pointer, next opens on right - unpredictable, no logic. There's enough space on the right but menu pops up on the left, and it's like alternating. One menu from the tip opens next menu on right, next menu from top (2nd) opens its submenu on left, despite rhaving enough space on
the right. This you might say is cosmetic. But there're many things we get accustomed in using our tools, including computers, that when behave erratically are not making me happy...
When using Windows Mail, I have a series of folders and sub-folders on the left side. It used to be that the sub-folders were always closed. Now, for some reason, the sub-folders are always open when I open up Windows Mail.
This is regardless of how I exit Windows Mail. In other words, when I'm all done with Windows Mail, I leave it with all sub-folders closed, but the next time when I open and use it again, I find that all the sub-folders are open again.
I have reinstalled my OS. Since then, my IE7 Favorites list (the dropdown menu that expands when clicking Favorites on the Menu Bar) opens in full length. The "Enable personalized favorites menu" option in Internet Explorer 7 does not hide my less frequently used favorites as expected any more. Is it a question of time until the list collapses and expands (I mean Vista learns my habits) or is it an issue that can be resolved?
I face a weird issue with my Vista Enterprise edition. Sometime back suddenly one day all the autorun settings disappeared from my system. When I checked the autorun defaults setting from the control panel I see that that dropdowns have gone blank completely. All the default options like "Open folder..", "Take no action", "Ask me everytime", etc. are simply wiped off... No more there! Later when I installed some software like picasa, winamp, etc. these programs got added to the options list in the autorun defaults, but the above default options are still missing.
Now the autorun works in my system, and automatically launches the applications like picasa or winamp for appropriate disks, but I can't set/select the options like "Take no action" or "Ask me everytime" how I can add those default options back again?
I have a Gateway notebook, originally installed with XP. Of course it came with the small restore partition (E. Since I've upgraded to Vista, I no longer need that restore partition and would like to expand C:, but I haven't been able to do so. I've gone into Disk Management, shrunk E:, deleted E:, but neither of these maneuvers resulted in the option to expand C:. Is it possible that the problem is that there is no free space in C: that is contiguous with E:? Would it help to defragment C:? Would that open up free space at the end of drive C:?
When I open Windows Mail every folder expands and when I go under Tools,Options and tell it to not expand folders, NONE of them expand. Is there a way to set folders to expand only when new messages are received? Outlook Express did this and it seems I must be missing something.
im currently experiencing a longer boot time for no real reason. After a fresh install i did all the usual junk. finally i decided to run a registry clean, then update my experience score. Rebooted everything was fine, then cam back after i went out & bootup took 3 times longer! I have a very powerful system & u can imagine the frustration of having to wait after it only took about 30seconds to boot b4.
I dont suspect the registry clean, all it did was remove reference to some files i had deleted hours earlier but i could be wrong. Luckily i had made a full backup before i ran the reg cleaner etc so ill have a try at restoring & see if it happens when i do nothing to it. i had disabled some services first thing but not sure that would do anything about 2 hours afterwards.
How far can you expand your average dell computer? if i can change the motherboard in my factory dell vostro 410 desktop, so that i can replace it with a motherboard that is SLI enabled? If so what motherboards should i be looking for, is there a specific one due to the size of the case? Also, being a dell computer i realize your limited into what your changing, does that apply to the PSU and CPU?
I just wanted to confirm a few things before I screwed up something (like, my OS). Usually, I'd use Partition Magic to resize partitions, but apparently, Vista includes something quite similar (and PM won't work on Vista) so I thought I'd give it a go. Also, this is with basic volumes, not dynamic. I have a single hard drive partitioned as: Primary Extended - contains logical partitions
1. When you shrink the size of the extended, does the extra space become available near the primary partition or after the extended? The reason I ask is because, I've read that the space you're adding to the primary must be adjacent to the primary partition. So, where does the extra space show up?
2. I've heard some people say you can't resize the primary partition without totally screwing up the OS. How likely is it that I'll ruin the OS by ADDING space? I could see a screw-up coming after shrinking a partition, but what about by extending?
I have turned on Personalized menus, and it been for two months now but I still get the full menu. How long does it take for the 'personalized' effect to kick in?
I have a customer's machine on the slab that had a corrupted copy of Vista installed on it and tried every rescue technique I could find (Vista recovery DVD, XP CD, WinPE and a few others) finally using Linux to backup the customer's files.
Installing from an OEM copy of Vista seems to be problematic at best, it stalled at 23% then rebooted, so I repaired the drive in XP and got to 56% before the reboot. So I nuked the drive with a slow format in XP and then it got to 70% before rebooting. It sounds like hard drive related but the customer's video card fan had dropped off so I suspect it may also be a heat related issue. Does anyone else have any ideas for the reboots?
For some reason certain programs are malfunctioning. If I try to click on any drop down menu the menu will automatically close and the border of the current window is constantly flashing. The programs I've found this to be happening so far are Outlook, Windows Explorer, and the start menu. I've updated windows as much as I can to see if that'll do it but nope.
Vista abbreviates my drop down menus. For instance, in IE when I click favorites, I get 12 items, until I click the little caret like characters at the bottom of the window, then all the favorites are displayed. Same in Excel, Word.
Windows home premium. I had to reload windows from a manufacturers recovery drive. this was due to hard drive problem. Since I have reloaded, in windows explorer, I don't get the same right click menu when I want to move or copy files. Used to be a "move to" or "Copy to" routine which greatly helped when moving files into a catalog format. Now I only get the standard cut, copy and paste commands. Does anyone know how to get the "move to" right click menus back?
Running Vista Home Premium x64 SP1. I have all my Start Menu links under my user account (not all users). I also have "Enable context menus and dragging and dropping" option enabled. I can right-click on items and rename/delete them, but when I try to drag an icon from one folder in the Start Menu to another folder, my cursor turns to a red "no can do" symbol and I can't drop the icon in the new folder.
Just wondering if its possible to remove old deleted programs from msconfig and other menus. I noticed in my msconfig, it still has all the apple programs like itunes and quicktime and bonjour etc in the list of services. Obviously because I got rid of them they dont work and it says unknown location but Im curious as to why they are still lurking around, since i did uninstalled them. Same with an old dvd ripper i tried out, now everytime i insert a dvd into my drive and the prompt menu comes theres still an option to use this uninstalled dvd program that has the blank icon next to it why wont it go away?
One annoyance that I've found in Vista is that unlike all previous Windows versions that I've used, when I get a file selection menu, such as for opening a file within an application or 'save as...', if the list is a multicolumn one, as is usually the case, the ordering of the files is NOT vertical as it always had been before, but is horizontal.
Although I can see a logic in this, the fact is that when I'm faced with columns, my eye naturally reads down each column, and therefore I need the vertical sort arrangement as had always previously been the case.
Please, therefore, does anyone know of a fix for this, so that I can restore vertical sort arrangement in those lists?
how to customise right click menus in Office 2007 applications? In Word 2003 I customised the right click menus to add a Paste Unformatted Text command but I cannot do it in any Office 2007 application.
Explorer is no longer working properly in a few ways. Programs often take a long time to start and display “(Not responding)” on the their top window frames. Right click menu sometimes takes a long time to appear while explorer freezes. The explorer window itself is sometimes quite long to change the display when I change folder (this is far from often, but happens).
The first window to appear when we click on the Start Menu, the one with the large icons, is usually OK, but sometimes it does the same as the “All Programs” second window;
Here, the folders do not open and on Task Manager I can watch explorer taking up all the CPU available resources immediately after I pass to “All Programs”;
However, if I click “Back” (explorer stops abnormally using all CPU resources);
Then I click “All Programs” again and the previously clicked folder is now already open, but explorer is again up with CPU resources, so if now I click on a subfolder or on another folder, it all repeats again.
My computer was running perfectly fine about a week ago,but now its become 100% slower! I got Norton Internet Security 2009 and Spyware Doctor and used them both to scan my computer, solved a few viruses and that was it. I have no new programs installed,in fact, I'd removed some programs. (except for NIS 2009/Spyware Doctor(It was also slow before I got those)) It was still slow...it takes literally about a minute to open programs and about 5 minutes just to start up. Normally it would take 1-2 seconds to open programs and 2 minutes to start up. I really have no clue what to do right now and this is really pissing me off right now!
When I double-click on a Contact file, I get the popup -
Windows cannot open this file:
File: filename.contact
Asks me to use Wed Service or select program from list of installed programs.
Neither works. MS Web Services (amazingly) does not recognize .contact. And there's is no Contact program in the list of programs (or anywhere I can find on my machine).
I am trying to play gears of war and it stops working right in the middle of me starting it up. It would play for a while load up and the game will stop working and the program closes. I tried installing it and running it as admin. Installed reinstalled the game and directX still nothing.
I have a home network that consists off an XP Desktop, a Vista Desktop, a XP Notebook and a Vista Tabletpc. They could all see and access each other with no problem. The Tabletpc and Notebook both are connected by wireless while the desktops are connected by Cat5.This morning I went to use the Tabletpc and it cannot see either of the other computers and they cannot see the Tabletpc., regarless whether I am connected by wireless or Cat5. However, they can see and access each other fine. The other three computers can see and access each other fine.I have tried everything I can think of to get the tabletpc to recongnize the other computers an vise-versa to no avail.The last time I used the tabletpc on my home network was about 8 days ago and it was working fine. That night I was admitted to the hospital for a week. While there I connected to the hospital's wifi. Not sure if this changed something or not but other than that I have not downloaded any software, updates, etc.
When i on my computer ( Dell Dimension E520 ) for three hours, suddenly shut down my computer, But a start button keep on flasher. I tries to on it back after shut down, but in vain, i believe sometime do with power supply. because after next day computer can start again.
first off let me give you the spec of my pc, im running Windows 64bit, MSI Dual Quadcore processor, 8 gigs of ram, 2 500gb harddrives, 2 gforce 9800vid cards and creative soundblaster soundcard. Anyways this problem has happened last time after doing ALL these windows updates, service pack 2, the whole works. MY harddrive light stays SOLID now, even when idle, I jsut got home from work after an 8hour day, and its still on? What is going on? I ran virus checks with AVG free editon that came with my pc, I keep everything up todate on a regular basis. Is this normal? It even sounds like I can hear my harddrive running, this is really starting to freak me out.
I have Vista Home Premium/2GB RAM/Core 2 duo I got this security alert today when I booted. When I open Windows Security Center it shows the problem that Windows Defender and Spyware Doctor are both turned off. That's as it should be and as it has always been. I have BitDefender Internet Security 2009 and it shows "No issue affects your computer."
I used an elevated command to check that WMI and it shows as consistent. So why did this alert suddenly start showing up?
I know I can turn the alerts off, but I'd much rather find out what caused this problem and fix it.
