Reliability

Stickies is becoming less and less reliable for me lately.

It's starting to act a little crazy.

1. One sticky refuses to allow me to type in it!
2. When I click on another sticky almost all of my desktop icons go entirely white!
3. One sticky sometimes has a transparent rectangular hole near its top !!!!
4. One sticky refuses to allow me to type beyond a certain line!

What could possibly be causing this?

Try the basics.
1 Reset your CMOS to default. 
2. Start in safe mode ("with network support") and do a Check Disk with repair automatically on every disk. 
3. Restart normally.

SPOOK wrote:Try the basics.
1 Reset your CMOS to default. 
2. Start in safe mode ("with network support") and do a Check Disk with repair automatically on every disk. 
3. Restart normally.

Thanks Spook.
You are recommending some very drastic measures.

If I had problems with any of my other programs I might consider trying your recommendations.
It just doesn't make sense that the disk problems you are describing would single
out just one program on my system.

OK, You're getting a lot in your storage, and when you try to type something, and it's checking your storage at the same time in background, it is trying to reconfigure and sort and fix and whatever it does with the database. It'll stop that computer every time right where you're at, right in the middle of it doing something.

The next time it does any of those things click on a sticky again and if you get the spinning wheel that's exactly what it is your computer is doing, it stopped to think.

Also, check and see if you have a big picture pasted into one of your text stickies on your desktop or in your storage. These things will eat up 5 10 15 20 MB and they take a long time to cook through.

Also could be trying to do a periodic save, this will stop everything until it saves it.

These things are what we call stalls.

Also, any program can cause a stall.

And some will cause a lock-up,  but never seen a stickie do that.

SPOOK wrote:...
The next time it does any of those things click on a sticky again and if you get the spinning wheel that's exactly what it is your computer is doing, it stopped to think.

Also, check and see if you have a big picture pasted into one of your text stickies on your desktop or in your storage. These things will eat up 5 10 15 20 MB and they take a long time to cook through.

Also could be trying to do a periodic save, this will stop everything until it saves it.

These things are what we call stalls.

Also, any program can cause a stall....

I'm not sure why you are doing everything you can but ignoring the elephant in the room. 


The problems I am having are NOT RANDOM!
They are REPEATABLE!

Think about that for just a moment.

Do you get the spinning wheel?

SPOOK wrote:Do you get the spinning wheel?

No spinning wheel.

1. One sticky refuses to allow me to type in it!     (More than one, repeatable)
2. When I click on another sticky almost all of my desktop icons go entirely white!  (Occasionally)
3. One sticky sometimes has a transparent rectangular hole near its top !!!!   (Occasionally)
4. One sticky refuses to allow me to type beyond a certain line!  (More than one, repeatable)


They are all annoying, but the repeatable ones are the most annoying.

On number two, when you click on it and everything goes white do you get the spinning wheel on that one. Give it a few seconds cuz it's cranking through some stuff.

SPOOK wrote:On number two, when you click on it and everything goes white do you get the spinning wheel on that one. Give it a few seconds cuz it's cranking through some stuff.

Thanks for stickie-ing with me on this Spook. 

Yes, on number two there probably was a spinning wheel. Have you ever had the same happen to you?
Of all four it's the least concerning, doesn't happen very often.

One and four are really troubling.

That's the Neatest thing I ever seen in stickies, "stickie-ing" with me. ( cool to the max)
Yeah, it's my pleasure.

On one and/or four do they ever recover to where you can type in OK?, after a little while mabie?

SPOOK wrote:On one and/or four do they ever recover to where you can type in OK?, after a little while mabie?

Nope. 

More clarification.
I have three stickies at the moment in this particular stack that are misbehaving.

Two of them have extensive text.
I can move the cursor with my mouse to anywhere in the stickie. I can also use the Pg-Up/Pg-Dn keys,
Home-End etc. etc.
Everything functions EXCEPT the ability to type anything or even use the space bar!

The third stickie behaves the same, except there is no text in it at all.

Does the cursor blink in one or both of them? Or is it gone or stuck on no- blink

Just a thought, you don't have them locked in the stack or on the sticky do you?

SPOOK wrote:Does the cursor blink in one or both of them? Or is it gone or stuck on no- blink

I was going to check, but decided to check something else first on a whim.

I said to myself these three stickies have 'locked' me out. I can't do anything with them.
So I opened up the settings for the stickies and lo-and-behold, right there staring me in the
face was 'Unlock stickie'.

As soon as I clicked on it I was back in business.
I can now access the three stickies once again. 

I never even knew about this feature before.
Somehow the three were locked, accidentally.

OK two down, two to go... 

Wow, we came up with the same solution at the same time.! Great minds think alike.
I think the other two are stalls, from an overloaded storage or you have a big picture on a text stick somewhere.
I agree, this is the elephant in the room. When the storage gets too big or you get a big picture on a text sticky things start to go south. This seems to be unfixable, lots and lots of people have asked TR to fix it but I don't think he can. There might be a prohibitive limit when using RTF as the programming media as I think stickies is programmed with.

The only solutions I've come up with for this boondoggle is to clean out your storage. (Recommend saving as .sty, .RTF is terrible.) The only other thing is to run as portable with -allowmultiple, keeping the stored as small as possible for each Stickies .exe.

Just a heads up, you can lock and unlock all the stickies in the stack from the right click and select the stack there should be a lock and unlock.

SPOOK wrote:...
The only solutions I've come up with for this boondoggle is to clean out your storage. (Recommend saving as .sty, .RTF is terrible.) The only other thing is to run as portable with -allowmultiple, keeping the stored as small as possible for each Stickies .exe.

Just a heads up, you can lock and unlock all the stickies in the stack from the right click and select the stack there should be a lock and unlock.

Yes it's funny we both thought of the 'Lock' at the same time. I hadn't even seen your reply before I thought of it.

You mention 'storage' a lot but I'm not quite sure which storage you are referring to?
When I think of storage I think of my SSD or USB sticks.

As far as pictures are concerned, all of my stickies are quite clean in that regard. I don't think even a single one of my dozens and dozens of stickies has any picture inside them.

Thanks for the heads up on locking/unlocking all the stickies at the same time. 
I'm just curious when would locking be useful? Do you ever use the function?

I agree, locking the working area is never useful. I have asked TR to not do that on lock and only lock the position of the sticky.. The only time I use lock and I use it quite a bit is to lock the position of the sticky.

The storage I'm talking about is when you right click the title bar you will see a "store". That stores the sticky and then you can go into manage.

SPOOK wrote:I agree, locking the working area is never useful. I have asked TR to not do that on lock and only lock the position of the sticky.. The only time I use lock and I use it quite a bit is to lock the position of the sticky.

The storage I'm talking about is when you right click the title bar you will see a "store". That stores the sticky and then you can go into manage.

Thanks again Spook.
One last question.

Could you please explain what 'storing' does?
It's advantages/disadvantages?

I tried to search for it here but couldn't find anything.

Absolutely, when you right click the taskbar icon down on the bottom you will see it says manage and settings and stuff like that. If you click manage it will give you a list of all the stickies you have stored and you can restore them or you can edit them pretty much anything you can do on a desktop you can do in stored and you can do searches for stickies.

If you right click the title bar on a sticky you should see something like save-as and store Etc. When you click store it stores the sticky in the category you desire and you can do a new folder into the database.

Now that I understand you're not using stored or manage now I understand what's going on you have too many stickies probably on your desktop and need to start storing some of them. Cuz it only does the store every once in awhile and that should speed you up and eliminate the Stalls. sounds like you have a long way to go before your storage gets too full I didn't know you weren't using storage.

Storage is a really very useful thing, and once you get used to it you will use that as much as you use the desktop.

SPOOK wrote:Absolutely, when you right click the taskbar icon down on the bottom you will see it says manage and settings and stuff like that. If you click manage it will give you a list of all the stickies you have stored and you can restore them or you can edit them pretty much anything you can do on a desktop you can do in stored and you can do searches for stickies.

If you right click the title bar on a sticky you should see something like save-as and store Etc. When you click store it stores the sticky in the category you desire and you can do a new folder into the database.

Now that I understand you're not using stored or manage now I understand what's going on you have too many stickies probably on your desktop and need to start storing some of them. Cuz it only does the store every once in awhile and that should speed you up and eliminate the Stalls. sounds like you have a long way to go before your storage gets too full I didn't know you weren't using storage.

Storage is a really very useful thing, and once you get used to it you will use that as much as you use the desktop.

OK thanks, that's a start at least. 
Is there a stickies 'manual' somewhere where I can read up on this?

I remember reading up on how to create my skins and stacks. That was helpful.

Currently I have seven stacks containing, 5, 3, 1, 2, 2, 10 and 10 stickies.

I didn't know there was another way to organize my stickies.
Is my way inefficient?

Everything is stored in the stacks so there is no clutter on my desktop.
I use a hotkey to open/close my stacks. Once they're open I choose which stack I want
to open.
After finishing, I will close that stack and then use the hotkey to close all the stacks.

I'm going by memory here so I'm not too sure. When you right click the icon on the task bar at the bottom there should be a help somewhere in there. And there's a there's a lot of stuff in that help.

SPOOK wrote:I'm going by memory here so I'm not too sure. When you right click the icon on the task bar at the bottom there should be a help somewhere in there. And there's a there's a lot of stuff in that help.

OK thanks Spook.
That help file was helpful. 

I see that the developer has tried to pack as much punch into this software as possible.

I started using stickies a few years ago as a successor to mPad (a bare bones version of Stickies from the 2000 era).

I have another piece of software (Ecco) that I use as my heavy duty PIM/outliner.

If I want to quickly jot down some notes on the fly, my first go-to now is Stickies.
But when I want to really stretch out and extend the ideas/research I will copy the stuff from Stickies into
Ecco and do my more extensive writing there.

Ecco has a phone directory, calendar, Todo lists and tons of other stuff. There is an Ecco cult that gives each other
tips and tricks on the software.

So I think I'm good-to-go with how I organize Stickies for my needs. 

Great, great working with you.

SPOOK wrote:I agree, locking the working area is never useful.

I FULLY disagree !

Locking content is VERY useful.
Personnally, I'm always locking content of all my stickies just after creating them. This prevents me to alter unvoluntarily the content.
I have just adapted my default skin, to have a lock/unlock button in title bar.
So, if I want to update something in an existing sticky, I only one click to unlock it, update content, and one click to re-lock it.
But since I'm doing so, I do not loose any more content of my stickies, what occured sometimes, due to unvolunteer mistyping...

I don't know, I don't seem to have the problem of involuntary mistyping. Let me see if I have this straight, you unlock it to type and that's when you have the involuntary mistyping. So what does a locking do?

It might be good for when you're sending a sticky over the network to a friend to have it locked when he receives it. Otherwise I got no use for it and I don't send any stickies to any friends over the network. I'm just sitting home alone retired.