Dell Inspiron 660s

Windows 7, Home Premium ed. 64 bit, 2 processor cores

More details about my computer: (Total "score" for Windows Experience was 4.5 because of the low Graphics score.)
Processor Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU G2030 @ 3.00GHz 6.9

Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB 5.9

Graphics Intel(R) HD Graphics 4.5

Gaming graphics 1696 MB Total available graphics memory 6.1

Primary hard disk 291GB Free (444GB Total) 5.9

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Graphics

Graphics Display adapter type Intel(R) HD Graphics

Total available graphics memory 1696 MB
Dedicated graphics memory 64 MB
Dedicated system memory 0 MB
Shared system memory 1632 MB
Display adapter driver version 10.18.10.4276
Primary monitor resolution 1280x1024
DirectX version DirectX 10

I'm sorry this is so long. The blurring, coming on top of my not-yet-bad-enough-for-an-operation cataracts is making life difficult. Even my desktop icons have this blur.

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Everywhere, even in documents, there is a blurring effect as if the letters were physical objects and had a strong light shining on them from the left that is producing a shadow, so the letters bleed over to the right. The picture doesn't show it well, but on the PC, I can even make out the dots over the "i's".

It seemed to start with the FireFox and IE browsers, but I soon found that even desktop icons had this sort of "accompanying shadow" effect. At first it was bearable, but it rapidly got so bad that I found it hard to use the computer. I spent hours looking online for a solution, but most of the suggestions were made years ago, and nothing worked.

A few hours later, even my pictures, photos and others, all became blurred,
and that was the ultimate horror; I decided that if things went on that
way, I would use my recovery CD and return the computer to factory
condition. Then I ran a full scan on Norton Security overnight. All it
found was several advertising cookies, but this morning, at least all my
pictures were back to normal but the fonts are still followed by
shadows that are hard to live with. It's like someone drew a finger from
left to right across not-quite-dry ink.

I had not installed any new hardware, though the USB connection to my printer did get loose--but that has happened before with no bad effect on the fonts. No new programs installed just before the problem began, either.

Some of the things I have tried:

Turning on or off ClearType / Updating the drivers / Changing the refresh rate / changing the resolution / Appearance>Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows>Adjust for best performance / turning off Use visual styles on Windows. None of those things made any difference. I ran Malwarebytes and MSE, which found nothing wrong. Oh, and system restore did not help, either.

Somewhere along the way, even my pictures, photos and others, all became blurred, and that was the ultimate horror; I decided that if things went on that way, I would use my recovery CD and return the computer to factory condition. Then I ran a full scan on Norton Security overnight. All it found was several advertising cookies, but this morning, at least all my pictures were back to normal but the fonts are still followed by shadows that are hard to live with. It's like someone drew a finger from left to right across not-quite-dry ink.

There was one suggestion I thought might help--to turn hardware acceleration either on or off--but I could not do so because I couldn't figure out how to access it in my edition of Windows 7. Some of the suggestions seemed to say that it could be accessed through the control panel, but at one of the steps along the way, the expected item that one should click did not appear. I guess my version of Windows is different.

I am desperate and will be so grateful if anyone here can help. If not, well, I have some spare time this week to use that recovery CD. Many apologies for the length of this...

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