Windows moved after sleep, undocking or a game? Save and restore your window layout

You wake the PC, and every window is piled onto one monitor. You unplug the laptop and plug it back in, and the desk you arranged is gone. Here is why it happens and how to get your layout back in one press.

Why Windows moves your windows

When a monitor disappears, Windows moves its windows onto the screens that are left, so nothing is lost off-screen. The trouble is how often a monitor “disappears” without you doing anything: a DisplayPort monitor going to sleep, the PC waking up before one of the screens does, a dock reconnecting, or a game changing the resolution of the main display. When the monitor comes back, the windows usually do not.

What Windows offers

Windows 11 can put windows back when a monitor is unplugged and plugged in again (Settings → System → Display → Multiple displays), and turning off DisplayPort deep sleep in the monitor's own menu stops some screens from vanishing in sleep. Neither helps on Windows 10, after a game has changed the resolution, or when you want two different arrangements.

Save a desk, and get it back with one key

Arrange your windows the way you like them, across all your monitors.
In Stillward Display, save it as a desk - “Work”, for instance - and give it a key.
Press the key whenever the arrangement is lost, and every window goes back to its monitor and its place.

It can also watch for you: after the monitors change - waking from sleep, a dock, a game that changed the resolution - it puts the desk you were using back by itself. And a desk remembers a separate arrangement for each set of monitors, so “Work” means the right thing on the laptop alone and at the full desk, without setting it up twice.

Positions are saved and restored in one coordinate system, and checked so that saving and restoring over and over never moves a window by a single pixel.

Good to know

A desk arranges the windows that are open; a preset can also start the programs that are not. Windows of apps that run as administrator stay where Windows keeps them, and Stillward Display tells you so.

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