My friend Jeff bought a used laptop from a friend and has had it for almost 6 months. Everything was just fine. He did want to get rid of a few programs that he wasn't using so he had a mutual friend Dave, get rid of them and then he defraged the system. They started to defragment, and left for a few hours to a party. They get back and the computer is shut off and won't boot up. Dave (aka "the idiot") decides to toss everything and start all over. It originally had XP home, He has since put XP pro on it. Everything is running fine and is really fast, except the image is like 4x6" is the center of the 13" screen. Everything is there, it's just 1/4 scale......

What can I do to help Jeff out?



If nessacary I can get the laptop to do a play by play fix.


thanks-

 

are his graphics/video drivers installed?

Make sure you install all drivers for that laptop

to find a list of what hardware you have,

Right click on my computer>>>go to hardware>>>device manager>>>Display adapters(insert other hardware devices)

go to the site and dl them.

 

I'll try to get the laptop from him and try that out.... Thanks for the quick reply Matt. I'll let you kknow what happens-

 

Yep, sounds like the display driver is not "in box", so XP is in limp mode. Hit the manufacturers website and snag the latest driver and that should fix it up.

XP has a 640x480 limp/compat mode it can fall back to if it can't find a driver that works with the display. That way you can at least use the machine to get a driver that will give you the full capabilites of the box.

 

try hitting the blue FN on the lower left and at the same time, either F7 or F8...