Computer Freezes After Open, Save As,...

Sometimes some issues should be classified in rather “bizarre” category if there is a tag for it. Many times hangs and lock-ups are bad signals that may be related to bad installation, application conflicts, graphic related issues or just bad files…but not always. A few days ago we have received one report from a customer who was experiencing lockups any time he tried to run OPEN or SAVE command. This customer did some homework and made sure the system is up-to-date, graphic drivers are also updated. CMDDIA and FILEDIA were set to 1 (you would be surprised how many of these we see).

So, what is bizarre about this one is that the issue is not with program, installation, bad driver or whatever,... but the fact that user was running multiple screens (very common these days) gave us this wild idea. One of the common reasons for dialogs not to show up, acting as there is a lock-up while in fact program is waiting for user response, is because the dialogs are displayed off screen. Put it this way, if you have multiple screens and you have different resolution settings, you may have your screens mapped differently causing some dialogs to show off screen.

So let’s see how we can check if this is the case.

In Command Line type OPEN or SAVE to get porgram to "lock-up" Then press the following keys on the keyboard, one after another: 

        1.     Alt (This gets your input device pointing at the correct option on the dialog you cannot see) 

        2.     Spacebar (This opens a menu on the dialog that you cannot see). Don’t worry if you don’t see it (in the background, it should look like on this image)

        3.    M (This chooses the "Move" option from the menu) 

        4.     One of the four directional arrow keys [Left, Up, Right, or Down] (This locks the window to your mouse cursor so it moves with the mouse.) 

        5.    Without clicking any buttons, move the mouse around until you see the dialog appear, following the mouse cursor. 

        6.     Click the left mouse button when the filter dialog is in the center of the screen. 
        7.     Make some change and click the "OK" button so that the dialog "remembers" that it belongs in the center of the screen. 

Other way to do it is to reset or restore your CUIX file. This would bring back all defaults. 

1.     Type CUI to go into CUI editor 
2.     In Customize tab, select CIVIL and right-click on it 
3.     Choose Restore.cuix or Reset.cuix if you want to reset it to factory defaults.

 

Have a nice day!