Help! My cat lay down on the edgoe of my keyboard and now my desktop uis oriented with what should be the lefthandside facing down. It's like making me sick to look at and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get it back to the normal orienation!!

Ctl-Alt-Arrow keys?

or If you're running XP, right click on your desktop and graphics options>graphics properties should pop up, and that's where you can rotate your display.

Thanks. I'll remember that for next time.

I wound up calling Dell. It's so difficult to know what to call problems like this. (I bet people who have average sized dogs don't have this sort of problem.)

Of course, the cat is now sleeping on the other end of the table. (Brat.)

Okay...so, my office's link with the UK is down, which means no corporate email. Internet traffic is being rerouted, but is still not at 100%. I can get to most sites ok if I stick to IE -- Firefox is giving me nothing but timeout errors.

Gmail is the one stickler. If I load it in Firefox, I get nothing but a blank page. If I load it in IE, I get a zillion tiny popups asking me if I want to run or save "firefoxhtml" (no dot). If I try to run them, Firefox opens up a teeny little window in the corner, which proceeds to do nothing. If I save...no luck. If I cancel, IE hangs the same way Firefox does.

(1) - WTF?

(2) - How can I make this stop??

I think the home computer may be dead.

I was doing a sweep last night when the power went out for a moment. When it came back on, the computer refused to reboot. Not in normal mode, not in last known configuration that worked, not in safe mode.

Hubs thinks it was a power surge, but the power strip was on. So I don't know what's going on.

Jessica:

Hmmm.

Try going into your internet control panel and changing your default browser to IE, then try downloading a new copy of Firefox if IE works after that.

Maybe Firefox got corrupted? Maybe IE did.

Hmmm

Hubs thinks it was a power surge, but the power strip was on. So I don't know what's going on.

Power strip or surge protector?

Also, try unplugging the power cord from the back of the computer. Also, try bypassing the power strip, if it is a surge protector, it may have given it's life.

FP, when you try to boot it, does it do anything (whir, click, beep, light) and then fail to start up usefully, kind of like the way a car will sometimes try to turn over a little but not make it? Or is it just deader than a doornail?

Try going into your internet control panel and changing your default browser to IE

As embarrassing as this is, I can't find where this is (it doesn't seem to be under "Internet Options" -- it may just not be available on the corporate installation of IE).

I've uninstalled Firefox and deleted the profiles and other extraneous junk. IE still wants to download "loading.html" which it says is a "FIREFOXHTML" type file whenever I try to log into Gmail.

There's a power strip. I think there's a surge protector involved. Unfortunately, I'm not the family tech expert.

It starts to boot up, then goes to a gray screen (much like the DOS entry screen) that offers several options (the ones I mentioned, plus a couple other safe mode options). If I go with any of the options I mentioned, it starts to boot up, then goes to a blue screen that says something similar to "boot overload."