Mesnews search panel off screen

Likely no one on here uses or has even heard of it, but all support seems to have gone...

Its an off-line newsreader, with a search facility. You press F3 and the panel to fill in the details of your search, is supposed to appear on screen. It does, but the search panel is mostly off screen in the top left corner. The only accessible button on the panel is Cancel, in the one visible part of the panel.

Its worked fine for years, until this week.

It will not drag. I've tried changing the screen res and it stays put. I've minimised and maximised Mesnews. I've restarted it. I've rebooted the PC. What else can I try please?

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield
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Alt+space then M, re-position using arrow keys and hit Enter when in desired position.

Reply to
Andy Burns

In a similar situation with something else the answer (for me) was to set the screen resolution higher, so I could see all the buttons etc.

Reply to
Graham.

That sort of works - I can get the panel to occupy the entire screen so it at least becomes usable (thanks), I can minimise it to just the title part and move either about - but the 'size' is grayed out.

The loss of the 'size' I think must be the real issue.

I cannot increase the screen resolution, it is already at maximum. I have tried reducing the resolution, which just showed the panel in the same inaccessible place.

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield

If you have a spare screen, and the machine has a VGA port (or extra gfx card or whatever) you could try extending the desktop and moving the place where the extra screen extends the desktop so that it is placed at the point where the off-screen window is being drawn. That might give you a view of it. Indeed your problems might be caused by having had an extra screen connected and using its extended desktop space last time the app ran & saved window size and position values?

The app is presumably remembering the windows sizes & positions somewhere. If you are lucky it will be in a plain text .INI file (or something like it) which you may find eg in %APPDATA%, and be able to edit. Or, the values may be in the app's registry data if it has any.

Reply to
Jeremy Nicoll - news posts

In article , Harry Bloomfield writes

I'm sure Andy will be along in a moment (thanks for the reminder on these shortcuts btw) but I suspect that size will only be greyed out when you are on maximise (alt+space, x). If you start from where you began (or choose Restore) with the window off-screen and choose either the move or size options in combination then you may get somewhere. eg. if you cannot see the window then choose the size option and try to increase the window size until it comes within the view, if you can see the window then use the move option to relocate it and then resize. Open a Notepad window and play with the alt+space commands to see how they work and to practice them.

If all else fails then you may find that an old school program like this stores the window position and size in a .ini file, try to locate this open it in notepad and try to find the size and location coords, modify to sensible values.

If you can't find the ini file then modify some parameter in the program (perhaps setting disp to full screen, save options then search for files modified today, sort by modified date and you should be able to find the ini (or other named settings) file and modify it.

Reply to
fred

Yes, any maximised window can't be resized until it's been restored, but other programs like certain windows to be a fixed size and can't ever be resized, I've no idea about mesnews.

Reply to
Andy Burns

I've done a bit more experimentation and...

There are several pop up panels similar to the Search panel and all behave as they should.

I've not been able to find anything which might be usefull to adjust in the .ini types of files and they are in French anyway. I also happen to have Mesnews on my laptop (this one) and I have just tested the Search. It works as you would expect, so my plan is to copy the Mesnews main folder across to my other system. Hopefully that will fix it.

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield

Numbers might not be in French!

What happened when you used the product website to email the programmer?

In the FAQ, at:

formatting link
this question (about a 'portable' install) strongly suggests that the app stores data in its main folder. But that seems unlikely for W7 or W8.

Did you try someone-else's suggestion that you change some options then search for the literal value of what you changed things to? Or search your system for all files changed at a particular time?

Make sure you backup the stuff that you're overwriting first, though. And if the app (contrary to the FAQ) does store data elsewhere, back the whole lot up together.

Reply to
Jeremy Nicoll - news posts

on 01/03/2015, Harry Bloomfield supposed :

After spending much of yesterday evening, trying to find a strategy to move the 11Gb of Mesnews's folder, from the laptop to my main PC, I settled for using the on line 'Copy' archive facility. I left it running all night, doing the transfer, ready to transfer it main PC.

Before starting the transfer process on to my main PC, I thought I would try the 'Search panel' one last time - it has suddenly managed to fix itself. Weird!

To answer some of the other questions...

Mesnews used to have it own Newserver. Software development and newserver supported by donations. The server seemed to disappear a couple or so years ago. The website had a help form, which I filled in, but there was no reply.

Shame, it is/was one of the better dedicated newsreaders.

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield

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