What kind of work did the computer shop do for you? By accident, because of my lack of knowledge, I did a Destructive Recovery when I was stuck on a black screen with white lettering I couldn't get out of. It brought me back to day one with problems that were fixed via Gateway phone support which is no longer. One being not able to do windows updates and a shut down time problem. They were supposed to see if they could fix that and do all updates for windows and the drivers. The computer (Win XPPRO) was brought in to find the cause of a sound that just started happening like a whirring speed up then down then steady starting after the computer is on for 7 minutes. They said the heat sync fan/fans are OK and unplugged my floppy drive thinking it was that when the floppy had been known to make a short noise when I first used it when I bought the computer back in 2004 but hadn't since. A noise like it may have been trying to read? That was not the noise I meant. Also is it possible the tech installed a new video card and disabled the onboard video in the BIOS? In this case you should see a different video connection lower down the rear of the tower which you would need to connect to. Is that the socket I plug my monitor into as I noticed I could not push it in all the way to hide the silver part I thought did before? Then screw each side tight. Is that it? If so, I bet they did but WHY? Before I brought it in, everything worked fine except because of the Recovery two problems came back that had been corrected by Gateway I wanted fixed again and I was concerned about a noise that recently appeared, me thinking it was my HD or the sync fan.

I used the Firefox(probably available for Chrome too?) add-on called Stylish. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/ I wrote this CSS(Cascading Style Sheet) to make it suit "me". CSS is what Gardenweb used to make it look their way. :) I'm not a programmer, just a do-it-yourselfer so I'm quite certain my code is not optimal... but it works good enough for me. If you want to try it, after installing Stylish, open a gardenweb.com page, select "Write new style -> For gardenweb.com", name it something like "Style Gardenweb" and paste this in, replacing what's already there. http://www.chuggerguy.com/pub/styleGardenweb.txt (Not the link, the text pointed to by the link) The background image I use for the center zone is hosted by me so you may want to change that, just in case I tire of it and change it, my machine dies, I die, or whatever. :) Of course you might just want to parse though it, take what you find useful, and leave the rest. Video is not visible, most likely your browser does not support HTML5 video Edited to add the video(If you don't see it, your browser doesn't do HTML5). You can right click and select view full screen if it's too small to see. Turning on my personal styling makes... a wee bit of a difference. This post was edited by chuggerguy on Sun, Feb 24, 13 at 1:52

Now I'm looking at a screen with a large dark border around it...probably a 10" screen on a 14" monitor... How do I correct this goof? Since I don't know the answer right off the top of my head, I'm going to suggest you reboot computer (shut it down and turn it back on) and see if that doesn't correct things. Rebooting seems to often solve a lot of odd miscellaneous problems. Sue

There is no doubt, shading the unit will help it's performance as long as you follow davidandkasies good advice. Make sure anything that is shading the condensing unit, does not block air flow or recycle the air that goes through the condensing coils. I like the 4 foot clearance idea for 2 reasons, it allows plenty of air flow so make sure if you put viney things on the trellis, they don't get out of control and invade that space. I've had to "weed" many condensing units that have failed or don't perform. Also, your service man needs to get in there to work or, to dodge wasps, snakes and other critters. I'm 6-5 and weigh 225 pounds and some of the units I've worked on made me feel like I was doing jumping jacks in a phone booth. Some of the other guys that read the thread can relate to their face against a wall and one eye peeking into a control box.