Thanks for the info. I am in no way stupid, but my skills are heavily in language and anything related to math can easily sandbag me. I am afraid of making my computer problems worse if I try to fix them, because that is exactly what has happened in the past. I don't open suspicious files but I still get an occasional worm or virus. I live in the country, precisely, among many Mennonite farmers, and technology has not found its way very deeply into this area. Getting technical help out here from Syracuse is expensive. MY ISP, TDS, whom I hate because I believe they gravitate toward underserved areas and then exploit their customers, offers an expensive monthly "service" to keep my computer fast and clean, but it is expensive and I am suspicious od TDS. I am fortunate that I can get DSL because many of the people out here are still stuck with dialup service. Few dare to try satellite service and I have heard nothing good about it. As I said, I research anything and everything that crosses my mind or which I want to buy and I am certain I am encouraging problems that way. I will ask the guru who is eventually coming about imaging. I have Asperger Syndrome and don't deal well with change and that is why I cling to MS products--I got started on them with an ISP employee sitting next to me, who set them up, and instructed me in their use. I have tried different browsers and mail programs in the past but the differences in them were extremely annoying. Another thing--I don't "intuit" very easily and things that seem obvious to others never dawn on me. I can and do learn but I need to find a tutor who can figure out how to explain things so I can grasp them. Still, I have compelted two MS degrees and theses with high honors since computers took over the libraries.

Jane - good question. I know I can use AOL free mail. It seems to me that this summer/early fall, I kept finding issues with AOL email - and several web-savvy people (like my web designer, etc. suggested that AOL is very troublesome in it's efforts to be helpful. Now I'm having trouble remembering why I was getting so frustrated with AOL. This is what I do recall. Not always being able to view embedded images (including an email blast from a non-profit I'm on the Board of). Difficulty formatting emails - if I cut and paste word documents in the email, it gets deliverd with all kinds of extraneous punctuation and symbols. I've had neighborhood listservs reject some of my postings bc. AOL sent so much gibberish with it. I had to rewrite it to get it sent to these neighborhood yahoo-group listservs in a format that was clear. I think (I could remember this wrong), that if I use AOL's fonts, colors, formatting - it may not get delivered that way. Now I'm opening AOL mail through the firefox browser and not using AOL software. I have found that the search function is vastly inferior to the search function if I opened AOl software. Having AOL email open in Firefox, the searching for emails is highly inaccurate - to the point of being almost useless. This is probably the single biggest frustration I have with AOL (now that I"m not using their software). I don't know that it would work any better if I used the free AIM instead of opening my AOL mail in Firefox. Not quite sure if and how AIM is different. Using AOL mail via Firefox - it just handles my emails badly. It will place emails in my old folder when I've marked them as save as new. I seem to have less control over where I save my emails. It seems to almost randomly decide whether it keeps the email in the new inbox - or places it in the old folder (where it eventually disappears). And I can only access old emails for a short period before they're deleted. And the recently deleted seem available for a tiny, tiny time compared with the AOL software. Jane - if your experience with AOL mail is different, please let me know. I know that it's just been very cumbersome and un-useful since I switched to Firefox this summer. Another problem -which may not be AOL, but could be firefox - or who knows what else. If I'm looking on craigslist and I want to inquire about an item for sale, I can't manage to reply to the poster. I hit the "reply to" button, it places that poster's anonymous contact info in the to: field - but when I hit send, it says that I can't send mail with parenthesis in the BCC field. I have not added anything in the BCC field - and if I click bcc field and delete everything in it, it still insists there are parenthese in the field and won't send the email. Gee - now that I start thinking about it, I guess I can recall all the frustrations I've been having with AOL (not using the AOL software). The reason I haven't cancelled my paid AOL account is bc. I still need to resort to going through AOL software to reliably access and search old emails. I will keep a free AOL account with my current email address - just so I can be reached by anyone I forgot to inform about my new address. And for those who forget and send to the old. I still want to receive those emails. But my hope is to use it less and less often bc. it's troublesome now. A different reason for not using AOL for my professional email is that it just doesn't look professional. (I presume that's one reason your husband using gmail for his professional correspondence - it's just more professional and less amateurish seeming to clients/customers.) not2bright- I appreciate the FWIW addition. It's a little over my head - but not completely. I do have a professional website - which my webdesigner set up to forward my emails to me. I'm not quite ready for setting up my personal email like this, but the more I hang out on this forum, the more I'm willing to attempt things that I once thought were not possible. Lynn.

is this a monitor you just added and now are having this problem or did this suddenly happen on a monitor you have been using? It sounds like the resolution is not set to the proper size for the monitor, look at your monitor info and find out what the preferred resolution setting should be, then go into your settings area and set the resolution slider so it corresponds with the preferred settings for that size monitor. Right click on desktop choose properties then the tab for the screen. If you tell us the model of the monitor and more info on it we could look it up and find the proper resolution setting for it.

azioh, I think you're prepared for a problem that's most unlikely to happen. I understand people like using these programs. For a home user (aside from a business use case when it might be required), I've never understood why. I haven't had a mail system mistakenly delete an important message. Have you? If you think that's a risk, then you could do your printout or other disposition of contents when important messages are first read. As a last resort, all messages can be re-sent. If an important one gets lost or misplaced, it should be easy enough to get a duplicate or find another way to get the attachment. Flight itineraries are especially easy to get from the airline's website, they're always available. Many travel and airline sites will do a download that can be easily imported to an electronic calendar. Google mail automatically reads flight info (like itinerary confirms) from emails and puts it on your calendar. For those using other mail systems, there are sites like Trip-it who will provide the same capability.