www.virtualacorn.co.uk/forum

Hi,
Occasionally Windows (XP Pro)programs generate popups from some background process - e.g. firewall alert, download complete.
These play havoc with VRPC in full-screen mode with the computer left in a half-in half-out of VRPC state and a various combination of alt-enter, alt-tab and the menu options needed to get back to normal.
Is there a fix for this?
Thanks,
Adam

The problem is that VRPC, as a Windows client, just gets interrupted with little chance to do much about it. It gets forced back to a window without its consent. This has to happen as the pop up could be important e.g. Firewall.
It is an occasional annoyance but doesn't cause any issues. A couple of presses of ALT ENTER will clear it (NOT ALT TAB)

I agree it's not a disaster but it is a bit messy . Is there any workaround - could VRPC be aware of the change and drop into non-fullscreen mode voluntarily? How do other Windows apps deal with it (e.g. games?)
As for not using Alt-Tab. I'll check next time it happens, but I have a feeling that because the input focus is lost Alt-Enter won't work but Alt-Tab followed by Alt-Enter will.
Adam

Some games ignore pop ups - This is a bad idea for a VirtualAcorn as the popup could be very important and stop other processes. Some others minimise themselves to the task bar.
One thing you could try to reduce the impact of the popups is to increase the VirtualAcorn ProcessorPriority to 3 (see the VirtuaAcorn Knowledge Base for information on latering the VA config files).
You might be having a bad visual experience because the popup has a high thread priority and VRPC doesn't get a look in to sort itself out as the popup "knicks" all the CPU time.

I tried this. It seemed to have the counter-intuitive result of slowing down the booting of RISC OS - to the extent that I gave up and reverted to 0
Adam

That's a really weird one - how can giving VRPC a higher priority slow it down Unless your PC is right at the limit resource wise.

I don't know but it does - I've just timed it. To get to the same place in the boot sequence under identical conditions took 35 seconds with ProcessorPriority = 3 and 10 seconds with ProcessorPriority = 0!


Nope, don't think so. I've got lots of RAM and don't have any performance problems.
Adam