I have a Dell XPS-420 PC about 7 months old, that started to operate
rather strangely about a week ago. It all started when I noticed that I no
longer could access a certain mutual fund website because at least a session
cookie needed to be available; it seemed as though cookies on my PC had been
turned off, although I did nothing intentionally along this line.
I experimented trying to get cookies back in a way that
would fix this website. I couldn't do it, but got a tech support person at
the mutual fund to walk me through the IE 7 and Vista cookie settings.
Eventually, after much experimentation, the website worked OK, but since
then, several seemingly unrelated but strange things have started to happen
on this PC. I think my experimentation with getting cookies back had some
adverse, unknown effects on several aspects of the computer setup.
1. First, I noticed that while the PC clock seemed always to show the
correct time, when sending e-mails, the e-mails sometimes were tagged
with an incorrect time and/or date. However, this problem seems to have
gone away.
2. The Dell/Google start page that appears on top of Internet Explorer (the
fun page that lets you "add stuff" from Google's library of neat
mini-programs) now only works to a limited extent. Most of the dozen or so
items I previously added from the Google library work OK, though a few no
longer work properly. But I no longer can add "new stuff" from Google, and
the existing "stuff" I added to the page no longer can be deleted! I should
mention that my wife and I have separate user accounts, and her Google page
(with different "added stuff") still works fine, so something has
malfunctioned within my user account, and not hers. Has anyone noticed this
type of problem and/or found a solution?
3. I have Norton Save & Restore 2.0 installed. I notice that, now, the
program wants to run backups most every day, even though I have the backups
clearly scheduled for every other day, except toward the end of the week
where it is to back up on Thursday and then not again until Sunday. When I
look at the program setup, it's right, but when it comes to backing up, the
program seems to ignore the settings and wants to back up most every day.
Any suggestions as to what may be going on here?
4. I notice when working with e-mails, every page I have edited during a
computer session is lined up one behind another on the taskbar at the bottom
of the screen. I must click on each page to get rid of it after I'm done
working. This wasn't the case beforehand, and this doesn't happen when my
wife uses her user account. What could have caused this anomaly?
5. A Dell support rep said I could set the PC back to a date just before the
problems started. But I am reluctant to do this, thinking that I might
introduce a whole new crop of problems and issues if I tried this.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. I'm stumped!
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