For anyone who's been following the saga of my laptop's imminent demise, I finally did it.  I bought a new computer. I thought the laptop would be content with a clean OS but in no time at all it was back to its old tricks, overheating and crashing at the slightest pressure.  I'm just hoping I didn't burn the processor beyond salvation.

So, I, who said I never would, at least not anytime soon, chickened out on a Mac, bought another pc and ended up with Vista. Very pretty, I'll give it that.  But it took two entire days to get it off my computer.  Silly me, I thought I could just toss in the old XP disk and overwrite it.  The Internet is full of people looking for a way to do it and a good number of people with ideas about how.  Most of whom, apparently, have no idea what they're talking about.  After two calls to tech support and being refused assistance, and after floundering in the chaos of internet techs, and after bringing in the big arsenal to nuke the drive (it didn't work) I decided if the hard-drive was going to get fried in the process I'd better try again to get advice from the people whose job it is to honor my warranty.  I had to threaten to return my computer to get them to divulge the secret.  

Another entire day spent configuring a wireless router.  I couldn't do it again by myself if some-one had me at gunpoint.  As long as I don't touch 3 critical buttons I shouldn't have to.

Next issue.  This one has had me going for days.  Screen resolution.  If you ever thought buying a large screen with higher resolution would give you a larger view, join the club.  I can't believe I did this.  I've been losing my eyesight on a 13" screen for years now so I thought a 20" screen, 1680 x 1050 would be like going to heaven.  Wrong. Completely backwards.  It's like graph paper.  Higher res = smaller squares.  i.e. text I can hardly see even with the aid of eye glasses and a magnifier.  Great for photos and watching movies, lousy for reading anything.  Well, if you have high resolution and a large enough screen it might be OK, but how big a screen can you sit in front of typing? Having spent hours fiddling with every thing possible to fix this problem, and making an even bigger mess,  I finally went back to changing the resolution down to 1280 x 800.  It works like nothing else has but it makes text blurry in a way that a native 1280 x 800 res probably would not.  I say probably because even my decrepit laptop has a clearer view than this.  

In the meantime, what a shock to see my web pages on these two different screens.  Although one might think so, it is not necessarily possible to design a website in such a way to make all the people happy all the time.  There are too many people with too many different sized screens, different resolutions and different needs.  (Not to mention different colors.)  The predominant advice is to leave it to each individual reader to resize web pages to suit oneself. And to choose a different font if you don't like the one you're looking at.  If you can, and that's not always possible, depending how the page is coded. 

If you're using Firefox you can get a Text Resizer Add-on for your toolbar.  It's really an indispensable tool.  If you're still using Internet Explorer, click on Page (over toward the right-hand side of IE 7) and go down to Text Size and change it.  Maybe IE has an add-on too that will make this more convenient. Do that instead of running away from websites you can't see without a second of effort.  All webmasters are in the same boat with this.  


Since I've lowered my screen resolution everything size-wise looks so utterly normal again, so perhaps this is not a huge issue for people.  If it is, you might have a monitor that's ill-suited for your particular needs.  Remember King Sisyphus from Greek mythology who had to push the rock uphill over and over forever and ever?  I think I can quit playing the part now and leave it to you.  Well, probably not.  I will no doubt continue to feel visually tortured by my inability to nail it down to the ultimate fix.  But that's just me.