Friday, February 17, 2006

HELP - I'm stuck in perma-zoom!!! (...and I can't get out!)


This is not how I intended to spend my day.

Today is computer-break-down-day in His 'n Her Condos.

Dick was having server problems this morning. My computer was fine, but I decided to quit out of all my apps, and restart it this morning. I hadn't restarted it in a few days, and I thought it might be good to clear it's little brain out.

that's when it happened.

It restarted just fine. I got the happy mac, and even got to the Finder.

Then all of a sudden....

ZOOOOOMMMM!

My computer screen went into perma-zoom.

Seriously - PERMA Zoom. It's zoomed in so far that all I can see is the tip of the cursor - heavily pixilated because it's so ZOOMED in!

curses.

Dick is working from home today, so we tried trouble-shooting for an excrutiating hour.

Nothing worked: We disconnected it from all USB devices, restarted, safe booted, tried to boot from the OS Disc, etc., We're pretty savvy at trouble shooting, but nope. nadda. zilch.

We're fairly certain that it somehow connected with the Microsoft Mouse that I started to use the other day (and installed software for). Remember that Zoom function that I found useless, and turned off, well, that's where this zoom came from.

We found this article on the web, which is essentially the same issues that I'm having today. We had already tried all of the fixes, and it still didn't work. But at least it goes along with our theory that it's connected to the fracking mouse.

I'm still covered under AppleCare, and surprisingly haven't had to use it for this computer in 2 1/2 years. I remembered that there's a Apple Store in the Stonestown Mall, so I figured I'd bring it over there. I tried to make an appointment for the genius bar online, but I got so frustrated trying to find it on the apple site that I just gave up, and drove over there. They weren't able to take me in immediately, so I had to make an appointment for this afternoon.

When I came home, I spent about 5 minutes on the Apple site trying to find out how to make an appointment online (for future reference). The U.I. totally bites - it was so unintuitive to find, and I can't figure out why they would design it that brain-damaged way.

So now I just have to wait. I can't do a damn thing on my Mac until we resolve this issue. (and what a stupid issue it is.) Luckily, I got a ton of work done this week, and today was going to be a light work day anyhow.

But still... Dick and I are getting ready to toss all of our computers out the window right now.

update

(back from the Apple Store)

Okay, now I feel a little silly, but very happy that the problem was easily fixed.

The problem was that somehow the Universal Access zoon function was somehow turned on.

I had tried to use Command-"-" to zoom out, but it didn't work.
The keystroke to zoom-out is actually "command-option-"-".

This is good info for future reference.

So, my apologies to the people at Microsoft- my problems today seem to be completely unrelated to my new mouse.

..and now I shall back-up my computer ;)

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