Monday, May 24, 2010

ZOOM ZOOM

I came in the house the other afternoon, hot and sweaty from working in the yard, and decided to go on line while I drank some tea and cooled down. On the first page I opened, and on several consecutive pages, when I attempted to scroll down using the wheel on my mouse, the text just kept getting bigger and bigger.

I could use the keyboard arrows to navigate, the Home and Page Down keys worked OK, but any attempt to scroll with the mouse just caused the text to zoom in or out.

I use Google Chrome as my default browser – I’ve found it to be faster and less prone to problems than Internet Explorer – but I had just downloaded the latest Beta version of Chrome that morning; who knows what kind of glitches it might have brought with it?

I checked set-up options on Chrome and found no obvious problems; switched to IE-8 and the symptom remained. At this point, after about 10 minutes of unsuccessful trouble-shooting, I decided to reboot and started shutting things down.

After turning off Outlook, I decided that I’d better check email messages before shutting down completely – as weird as the computer was acting, I wanted to be sure I could still read my messages. When I clicked on the Outlook icon, I got:

safe mode

My left elbow had been propped on the table the entire time, with my forearm over the lower left-hand corner of my wireless keyboard - holding down the Ctrl key!

Control plus scroll equals zoom – I wish that I could say this is a feature that I had used in the past but forgotten, but it’s a feature I use often on forums such as RV.net where posting oversized pictures can cause a loss of text.

No comments:

Post a Comment