Huh. What an interesting problem. (Sorry, that's all I got.)

Does this happen no matter what network she's on? Or just one? Is it wifi? or a cellular data network?

Hmm... I just read that there's no standard way for web server code to identify if a client is a mobile device (so the server can then send different code to the client).

In case anyone's interested: Detecting Mobile Browsers

This is browser specific, but an interesting example of how some esoteric setting could cause the server to think it's talking to a mobile device.

I wondered why my Firefox (on a regular Windows PC) was detected as "mobile" by a lot of sites, that wanted then to display me their "mobile" version.
Turns out that I had once an extension to enable it to wiew WAP, so the option (in "about:config") "network.http.accept.default" was set to "text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5,text/vnd.wap.wml;q=0.6".
I reseted it to default value and all works well since then.

Well, she's only on one wireless network. Standard comcast wifi via a belkin unit. And yeah, I was useless too. Admitted it right up front. I grew up on macs, unix and before unix, vax, and am a complete dunderhead with wireless voodoo, so my logic is useless.

If she's on Comcast she might try calling for support. Potluck, but some of the support people are really nice and will go out of their way to help with things that are obviously not their fault (especially if you admit up front that its not a Comcast problem but just called in hopes they might happen to know the answer.) Don't promise they will be either willing or able, but some of them both can and will go out of their way to help talk you through problems that are not strictly a Comcast responsibility.

So here's a question.

My 82-year-old father is utterly dependent on his computer for managing household finances, sending email, tracking prescriptions and so forth. His Dell laptop is about four years old and had slowed down so much he hired somebody to fix it, who instead screwed it up so badly now it no longer works at all. He can't even get Windows to boot.

Happily, he had an auto-backup in place, so I don't think he's lost anything.

The question then is, do we try to revive this laptop, by wiping it & reinstalling Windows? Or talk him into another machine, and if so, what machine?

I'm tempted to try to sell him on a Macintosh because of the limited maintenance, but I suspect he'd kick at the price tag.

Thoughts? And please remember: 82. Do not tell me to build a machine and install Ubuntu on it.

dell has some sales going on right now, you might want to take a peek. I think dealnews.com might summarize them all.

I might recommend a mac, but does he really want to change operating systems?

Will it not even boot in safe mode? If so, I'd go with formatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows.

It sounds like wipe and reinstall to me as well. I'd suggest installing Windows Defender and Microsoft Security Essentials for anti-malware and virus protection. They are the least intrusive security programs I've ever seen.

I still haven't decided what to do with my inherited iMac. My Aunt could use the computer, but I don't know if she could handle the OS change from Windows. The computer I gave my 94 year old grandfather is ancient, but again, I don't want to disrupt what he's used to. In this case, Fedora Core.

It's a PowerPC iMac, so it's already on its way to being a doorstop.