What the heck happened?? I'm a MAC guy so I'm totally in the dark here. My mother has a DELL running Windows XP. To be more specific its Windows XP Media Center Edition/ Version 2002/ Dell Dimensions/ Platinum (R) 4 CPU 2.80 GHz . .. . Whatever all that means.

Anyway, she said she was using it today and she pressed something and everything changed. When I examined it I discovered that all the type was HUGE and neon colored! The desktop image was blank and all the fonts were HUGE there as well. It looked like a completely different computer. She said she went into something called 'system restore" and tried to set the computer back to an earlier time but it didn't do much.

I messed around with it a little and seem to have all the fonts restored and looking somewhat normal but NOW (and this is the current big problem) NOW for some reason when you are on the Internet it doesn't display backgrounds! That's right. . . you see the type on every page but none of the background colors or images. Also, on some pages it changes the color of the fonts! For some reason you also get these black boxes around blocks of text on various pages. It's so freakin' ugly! I have gone into the control panel and tried to tweak EVERYTHING but nothing helps.

Did her DELL get a virus, maybe? Maybe took a power surge or something? I doubt this could have happened from her hitting a wrong button, like she claims! By the way the browser she uses is Internet Explorer.

Anyone have any idea what's going on and how to fix it?? Thanks.

Hello Ooblenoof, and welcome to the forum.
Try this and see if it makes a difference, since youve alread tried system restore. Reboot the system, and during POST, before windows starts to load, continuously tap the F8 key to get to the advanced options menu. From the list, scroll down to "Last known good configuration" with the up down arrow keys, till that option is highlighted. Press enter to start windows . If that doesnt help, get back to us . Its possible it could be a malware issue, and one of the techs will look at it for you.

Well thanks . . . that was an interesting ride but it did nothing. Like I said, I was able to put a new desktop image on but everything else is still sluggish and weird. Web pages still all look wrong. OK so how do we address that "maleware" issue?

follow the prework link in my sig and someone wil take a look at it.