Sudden appearance of huge icons and text

I'm running Windows Vista Home Premium. Last night, when I switched on my
machine, all the icons on the home screen and the text in (for example)
Outlook and Word were suddenly enormous. The only way I could restore them to
normal size was to turn off the machine, unplug it, wait a few minutes and
then restart the computer. Can anyone tell me why this sudden explosion in
size happened and is there a better way of tackling it (if it happens again)
than unplugging everything? Thanks a lot - Max

 

maxfindlay wrote:
<!--coloro:blue--><span style="color:blue <!--/coloro-->
> I'm running Windows Vista Home Premium. Last night, when I switched on my
> machine, all the icons on the home screen and the text in (for example)
> Outlook and Word were suddenly enormous. The only way I could restore them
> to normal size was to turn off the machine, unplug it, wait a few minutes
> and then restart the computer. Can anyone tell me why this sudden
> explosion in size happened and is there a better way of tackling it (if it
> happens again)
> than unplugging everything? Thanks a lot - Max<!--colorc--><!--/colorc-->

It probably wasn't necessary to unplug the computer, just to reboot. The
error was caused by your video card losing its resolution settings. If it
doesn't happen again, don't worry about it. If it does happen again, either
something you have running is changing the resolution settings (an old game
not really designed for Vista can do this) or the video card is starting to
fail.

Malke
--
MS-MVP
Elephant Boy Computers - Don't Panic!

 

On Sun, 18 Oct 2009 05:31:02 -0700, maxfindlay
<maxfindlay@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
<!--coloro:blue--><span style="color:blue <!--/coloro-->
> I'm running Windows Vista Home Premium. Last night, when I switched on my
> machine, all the icons on the home screen and the text in (for example)
> Outlook and Word were suddenly enormous. The only way I could restore them to
> normal size was to turn off the machine, unplug it, wait a few minutes and
> then restart the computer. Can anyone tell me why this sudden explosion in
> size happened and is there a better way of tackling it (if it happens again)
> than unplugging everything? Thanks a lot - Max<!--colorc--><!--/colorc-->


What you are calling an "explosion in size" was almost certainly the
monitor's running at a lower resolution that what it had been set at.
Why it happened, and why restarting fixed it, I don't know.

--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP (Windows Desktop Experience) since 2003
Please Reply to the Newsgroup

 

"maxfindlay" wrote:
<!--coloro:blue--><span style="color:blue <!--/coloro-->
> I'm running Windows Vista Home Premium. Last night, when I switched on my
> machine, all the icons on the home screen and the text in (for example)
> Outlook and Word were suddenly enormous. The only way I could restore them to
> normal size was to turn off the machine, unplug it, wait a few minutes and
> then restart the computer. Can anyone tell me why this sudden explosion in
> size happened and is there a better way of tackling it (if it happens again)
> than unplugging everything? Thanks a lot - Max<!--colorc--><!--/colorc-->
This Tutorial may help you: