I use the Desktop Background slide show, cycling through nearly all of the supplied backgrounds — on a 30 minute interval.
Well something strange happened this morning … when the system was booting up. As I have described before, in my dual monitor configuration the right hand 24″ monitor is designated the MAIN MONITOR. The desktop is extended across the left hand monitor, but there is no task bar and I keep all of my desktop icons and gadgets on the right hand monitor.
I like a tidy desktop. So, counting the recycle bin, I only have 10 desktop icons and two gadgets (CPU/memory utilization and calendar). Eight of my icons are lined up, very neatly, in a vertical stack against the left most edge of my main monitor.
This morning, at boot … with all of the boot activity taking place on the LEFT HAND monitor (though it is not my main) … there appeared to be a desktop background SWITCH just as Windows 7 was cutting in the right monitor.
Both screens flashed, settled down … task bar, recycle and gadgets were in place … but my 7 icons were shifted … in line … 80% of the way to the other side!
As many of you know, the icons get shifted IF you change screen resolution. Similar effect, MORE pronounced.
Tried to reproduce it … no luck.
I am sure it had to do with the desktop background switch occurring at the very instance the ‘main’ screen was getting activated.
I thought about it. Easy enough for MSFT to fix. Get a feeling that they don’t reset the interval timer on system shutdown. So whatever was left of the timer gets restarted at boot. Easy fix would be to reset this timer at boot. That way a background switch cannot occur when the system is coming up. The other way is to just add a delay to the background switch — i.e., disable switching until system is fully up and rumbling.
I see that MANY folks visit here … after doing a search of “Windows 7 dual monitor.” So I was happy to write this up. Hope this helps.
Cheers.
Anura Guruge
www.guruge.com
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