My computer worked fine this morning. When I got home from work and turned it on to use it this evening, the screen resolution went to 640x480 (it used to be 1024x768) and my mouse pointer is gone.

I'm running Win ME.

Any suggestions? thanks....................matt

I have been able to make some progress.

Looking in Control Panel / System / Device Manager, I found multiple instances of the driver for the monitor. I deleted all instances for the monitor driver and also for the mouse driver and then restarted the PC. Windows booted and then found the "new" hardware and loaded the correct drivers. I now have my screen back and my mouse, but I lost my sound!!!!!

I'll be working on it some more over the next few days. What a shame Windows is SO fragile.

Once I get my machine running properly again, I'm thinking about imaging the hard drive. I have never done this before. What I'd like to be able to do is image the hard drive to a CD. Then the next time Windows breaks, I could consider re-imaging the hard drive using the CD as the source. Anyone have any experience doing this? thanks

Hi BluesMatt,
apologies for the delay in responding to your post.

Matt. I am just checking in with you to see if you still have problems, if so please post back and I will PM the Tech Team and get them to look into your request.

Again sorry for the delay Matt.

Thank you

Cart

Thanks for the checkin --

Yes, I still don't have sound. At least I got my screen and mouse back. I've spent some time backing up files to CD (something I've over-looked for a while) in case I crash and can't get back up.

I'm close to doing a Windows repair or maybe a fresh install of Windows. What makes me hesitate is not knowing if I have all the drivers I need to get the hardware working again.

I went thru a similiar problem at work last week where I had to do a fresh install of Windows on an old company laptop. I did not have the Dell drivers CD so I had to go to the net to get the drivers. My problem was that for a couple of the hardware devices in the laptop, there were multiple drivers listed. I couldn't see a way to see enough hardware details on the laptop to be able to select the correct driver from the web (like the networking hardware). So I just picked the first one and it seemed to work so I left well enough alone. But it made me wonder, how do I know which driver to pick? When I look at the device manager, it gives me a little information but not enough rule out all of the driver choices but one. Any suggestions?

thanks........................matt