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My dad was apparently trying to start Quake 2 when the system froze, so he turned the power off and rebooted. When the desktop came back up, everything was... well... HUGE. The start button is three inches wide, and you can't fit enough of the display window on the screen to adjust anything. How do I get his computer usable again when I can't fucking use the operating system? I don't want to reinstall the OS.

1) Kick your own ass for running Windows ME.
2) Install an operating system that actually operates.

I think my dad bought it with ME. I had no hand in this.

It froze while playing QUAKE 2!!!?

Ok, right-click the desktop, hit 'properties' and go to the 'settings' tab. Start playing with the rez till you get it right.

Then get a new OS.

First thing I thought of, but I can't get to the resolution because the top part of that properties window fills the entire screen!

I don't think you can fix it without reinstalling.

Grrrr............

Have you tried Safe Mode? That always defaults to 640x480, so you can set a screen size in there and then log back in normal mode to get something you can work with (picture you can set in Safe Mode tops out at 800x600x16, I think).

Yeah, actually, I did that shortly after my last post. All fixed. I'm still making him get rid of ME though.

GrandAdmiralPrawn wrote:My dad was apparently trying to start Quake 2 when the system froze, so he turned the power off and rebooted. When the desktop came back up, everything was... well... HUGE. The start button is three inches wide, and you can't fit enough of the display window on the screen to adjust anything. How do I get his computer usable again when I can't fucking use the operating system? I don't want to reinstall the OS.

That happened to me once with Windows ME. I know of two other people it happened to twice. Dell tried to tell me it was a virus.

I don't know what causes it or really how to fix it but I do know that as I've been constantly getting updates for Win ME I haven't had the problem since that one time.

Incase the problem happens again I've thought about putting a link to the system Restore. That has fixed a lot of problems I've had in the past.

GrandAdmiralPrawn wrote:Yeah, actually, I did that shortly after my last post. All fixed. I'm still making him get rid of ME though.

How do you make it come up in Safe Mode?

Tsyroc wrote:

GrandAdmiralPrawn wrote:Yeah, actually, I did that shortly after my last post. All fixed. I'm still making him get rid of ME though.

How do you make it come up in Safe Mode?

Keep tapping F8 while your computer boots and you should get to a menu of some sort.

Or I think a boot disk might work...

Dalton wrote:

Tsyroc wrote:

GrandAdmiralPrawn wrote:Yeah, actually, I did that shortly after my last post. All fixed. I'm still making him get rid of ME though.

How do you make it come up in Safe Mode?

Keep tapping F8 while your computer boots and you should get to a menu of some sort.

Or I think a boot disk might work...

Hold down the left shift key after you get past the bios screens...

Dalton wrote: Keep tapping F8 while your computer boots and you should get to a menu of some sort.

Or I think a boot disk might work...

Thanks.

Dalton wrote:Keep tapping F8 while your computer boots and you should get to a menu of some sort.

Or I think a boot disk might work...

More specifically, you hit F8 when your system lists what is using what IRQ, etc. (comes up after it detects your RAM and IDE/SCSI devices)

I've had this happen to me before. Load up Q2 again, set the res to a more sane one and then restart the machine. You might have to do it more than once. For some reason when Quake 2 crashes the screen res doesn't get reset.