What did my cat do to my computer?

December 28, 2007 3:23 PM

Why is my screen all stretched out and blurry?

Cat walked across keyboard and now all text (both web pages and Word docs) are a little bit stretched out and slightly blurry. Another weird symptom: In Excel, I can't type more than five characters in a cell without everything after the fifth character disappearing. Any ideas what Kitty did and how to undo?

posted by Ollie to technology (10 comments total)

What computer do you have, and what operating system are you running on it?
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 3:34 PM on December 28, 2007

Did you try rebooting.
posted by furtive at 3:35 PM on December 28, 2007

Sorry, I meant to post that: A toshiba laptop, and windows xp. And I sorted out the Excel problem but not the blurry stretchy problem.
posted by Ollie at 3:35 PM on December 28, 2007

Yep, tried re-booting.
posted by Ollie at 3:36 PM on December 28, 2007

I'd guess it was either your screen resolution (did you check those settings?) or perhaps the cat somehow turned on ClearType? I don't know how it would be able to do that with a couple of random key strokes, but I'd check anyway.
posted by Ms. Next at 3:40 PM on December 28, 2007

Yes, it was screen resolution. Thank you. Now it looks weirdly crisp, but maybe I just got used to the blurriness. thanks all.
posted by Ollie at 3:50 PM on December 28, 2007

My guess is that the display resolution changed, and no longer matches the LCD native resolution.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 3:51 PM on December 28, 2007

There will be a "helpful" Toshiba extra running in your system tray, which allows you to change your screen resolution without using the standard Windows controls. This would be very easy for kitty to use. Unless you have a need to change screen resolutions often (and most laptop users won't), you should probably turn that off; poke around in its options until you find "show in system tray" or similar.
posted by flabdablet at 4:45 PM on December 28, 2007

If that's the only thing that Toshiba extra does, you might as well remove it entirely.
posted by box at 5:00 PM on December 28, 2007

on my toshiba, fn + spacebar does a weird zooming thing. (my spacebar actually has a little blue magnifying glass on it)
posted by drjimmy11 at 5:19 PM on December 28, 2007