Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Michael Williams" <michael AT metalab.unc.edu>]

My l33t Googling skills have been stumped by my parents' computer
monitor, and so I bring this before the Triangle's finest.  Any help
will be greatly appreciated.

In short, my parents bought (entirely on their own, a source of great
pride) a basic HP computer a couple of weeks ago.  It was part of a
bundle deal at a big box store, and came with a 15" HP-brand LCD
monitor.  Everything was fine for two weeks and now, described by them
with phrases like "all of a sudden" and "we didn't change anything,"
they say that all the characters displayed in any given email or
webpage (the only two things they do with it at this stage) are
"fractured," that bits of them are missing or reversed and that they
can make out what the words are but that it's very difficult.

Nothing else seems out of whack - the display isn't fuzzy, the colors
aren't all weird, they've rebooted the computer and powercycled the
monitor and unplugged the cable and checked it and plugged it all back
in nice and secure, etc., etc., and it makes no difference.

(FYI, on Christmas day I set them up with Firefox, Thunderbird, AVG,
Spybot S&D, so on and so forth, and my nephew is running regular scans
for them.)

I can think of absolutely no reason to believe that the monitor has
some hardware problem that would affect only fonts.  (The text in a
rendered image, such as a logo on a website, is of course unaffected.)
Likewise, I can think of no setting or option or whatnot that would
lead to this.  They don't even know enough to be dangerous, truly, and
though a random key sequence that does something bizarre and invisible
is not at all out of the question, given my father's "typing"
"skills," I know that they haven't just thrown open a preferences
panel somewhere and started seeing what the pretty radio buttons do.
They don't even have a cat that might have walked across the keyboard.

Google tells me nothing.  I haven't worked in desktop support in over
ten years.  I don't use Windows at home on my own computer.  I am at a
loss, and so are they, and trying to get them to describe something to
me about their computer is like asking a Martian to converse with me
via interpretive dance.

Where was I?  Oh, yes.  Does anyone have any clue what they might be
describing and how to fix it?

--
Michael G. Williams
michael AT metalab.unc.edu
robustmcmanlypants AT nc.rr.com
http://www.robustmcmanlypants.org/blog/