weird computer-screen epilepsy

[kareina]

My computer has been being annoying, and I am asking here to see if anyone is able to suggest a way to make it behave again. At apparently random intervals when trying to work on my thesis my screen suddenly goes spastic, everything jumps up and down by a centimeter or so for a bit, and then suddenly I'm at the bottom of the document in the list of references instead of where the cursor was the moment before. Generally, once it begins doing this, it continues to do it, all too often, for a while.



Details you may or may not need before making suggestions:

the computer is a notebook made by ASUS with 2 GB of RAM

the operating system is Windows XP 2002

the program which seems to have a problem is Microsoft Word (Office 2003). I use the "outline" view and various levels of "headers" to organize the document and quickly skip to the section upon which I wish to work, and then often switch back to "page layout view" if there is much to type in that section.

I also run EndNote 9.0, which is what created the list of references to which the cursor suddenly jumps.

The program also seems to be worse about engaging in this terribly annoying habit when I've been adding "captions" and "cross-references" to the captions for figures and tables.

(note, at this point the document does not actually contain the figures, instead there is a section of the outline called "figures" which is a list of all of the figures, their titles, and the file name/location so that I can find them again later--this is what the cross-reference fields point to).

I instead of a mouse, I use (attached via a USB port) a drawing tablet/pen (model CTE-440)

There is also a second monitor (Fatron L1932S, attached via RGB cable). (note: thus far I've only had the word processor open on the notbook monitor, and the various things I need to look up whilst working on the spare monitor, so I don't know if it has a problem on both monitors--but the second monitor isn't in as good of a position to be the main working monitor, so I may never find out).

Often when working on my thesis I've got a variety of other programs/windows open at the same time, including usually three to 10 Excel spreadsheets, one or two instances of Eudora, Endnote, plus or minus notepad, Firefox, CorelDraw, CorelPhotoPaint, ArcMap...



I would be ever so grateful to whomever can come up with a way to solve this problem--the longer this thesis gets, the more difficult it will be to cope with it suddenly flickering and skipping to the end of the document like this.

Comments

[allergicone.livejournal.com]

from my limited and out of date knowledge of PC stuff (Friedrich converted me to Macs more than 10 years ago and I haven't looked back except to play with possibly running my own Linux server), it sounds like a bug in the program, or problems in memory.

When I had twitchy problems with my master's thesis, I saved a copy, and made a duplicate to work from periodically, so as not to lose it. This came from the lesson of accidentally taking the most recent copy to a computer lab on campus, where I did some work on it, and proceeded to get distracted and leave it in the machine. When I came back, the disk was gone, never to be seen again. To say I was pissed off was an understatement, and then I went out and got pissed. ;)

You could also try breaking the document into sections stored as separate files, which would cut down on the memory required to deal with it all at once, then paste it all into one doc at the end... not entirely ideal, but one way to deal with memory overload...

Dunno if that really helps, but it's ideas...

[josiestraka.livejournal.com]

I agree that it sounds like memory related. I bet you are using more memory on the pc than what you have, so it is paging to disk more and more as your document gets longer. Some troubleshooting thoughts:
Check the event log for entries that match the date/time of the problem. Start > Run > eventvwr. I normally find clues for this kind of problem in the system or application logs, but you can view them all. Look for errors or warnings.

Also, when you get the problem, see what your computer resources look like. Start > Run > taskmgr. Go to the performance tab and look at the Physical memory numbers (total, available, system cache).

Another idea is to divide the problem up - close all the other programs you normally run and just use this one for a time (if that is possible, I know sometimes that is not possible since you may be moving data back and forth between programs). The idea here is to see if the problem only happens when you are taxing the memory at the computer.

If you get more information from doing any of this, post it...

[clovis-t.livejournal.com]

My laptop has started doing this also, but only when Endnote is open, Word is in outline view, and I have at least one footnote in the Word document.