Windows 10: My parents' Win 10 has screwed up colors- help!

My parents called today to tell me that they can't read most of the text on their computer, which they recently updated to Windows 10. I spent the last hour trying to figure out what the problem was via my mom holding her phone up to the screen for video conferencing purposes, so believe me when I say I am at my wits end.

From what I've been able to tell, it seems to be some system-wide setting that is turning some text and other colors to the inverse of what they ought to be. The problem shows up in multiple broswers as well as Excel. See the following two screenshots (taken via videoconference) for examples.

In the first one, a webpage displayed in Firefox, the text box at upper right should be displaying black text on a light grey background. (That's how it displays in Chrome on my computer and on all other computers from which I have accessed that site.) Instead, it shows up as almost-unreadable white text on a light grey background. It displays identically in the Edge browser as well. As you can see, it can be made readable by highlighting the text which changes the background to purple, but even that highlighting seems wrong because it displays blue when I do it on my computer.



Similarly, look at Excel. All the cells are black, and the text is white! What sorcery is this?!?




Anyway, I tried some things, including turning High Contrast on/off under Ease of Access, and something about inverting colors under the Magnifier, but nothing I tried seemed to fix it, and none if it seemed to have ever been changed from the defaults in the first place.

Any help anyone can offer would be much appreciated!

:)

 

How do I change the look of Windows 10?

In Win 7 you could use the High Contrast to make it act like XP.

In Win 10, High Contrast is an absolute nightmare. If you change the taskbar color, it changes the color everywhere else. You have limited number of colors and you can't specify things.

Microsoft looks like they wait until the last minute to do the personalization section and said "screw it".

That or it's like in Windows 7 when they screwed up the Start menu. It later came out that a Microsoft programmer created a bug in the Start menu and since no one at Microsoft can fix bugs, they made an executive decision to just not fix it. Might be why
they tried getting rid of the Start menu altogether in Win 8.

I think they hire a new round of programmers for each release and they don't give them access to view anything in previous releases.

 

Windows 10 Family Safety setting not pushing to devices

Ugh my kids parental settings are no longer saving as they once where on their phones. I can no longer block apps. I have spent days on this. Windows has really gone and screwed everything up.

 

Did you get them to make sure the cable from the computer to the monitor is seated properly.

Also when I help my mom I use TeamViewer once you set it up with Unattended Access it will save you hours on trouble shooting. For example last week my mum could not logon to her computer after a restart but I could with TeamViewer, Turned out there was a USB driver issue in device manager, What took me less than five Minutes with TeamViewer would of escalated into more than an hour without it.

 

Both good suggestions. I did have them unplug/replug one end of the monitor cable, then the other, with no effect. I'll try Team Viewer tomorrow. If anyone can offer any specific places to look while I'm on Team Viewer, that would be extra awesome! *092*cake

Thanks again!

 

Welcome to the Ten Forums


I am just guessing but look at this tutorial.
DPI Scaling Level for Displays - Change in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums
or
https://www.windowsphoneinfo.com/threads/change-screen-resolution-of-display-in-windows-10.8321/
or
Change the theme to Windows theme.
Theme - Change in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums

Jerry

 

I made sure they switched to the default Windows theme, the same one I have selected on my computer, but it didn't help. Excel cells are still displaying white text on a black background. I haven't looked at the DPI stuff, but its hard to imagine how a DPI setting would affect colors. Anything I'm missing there?

Thanks- any/all suggestions appreciated and welcome.

 

The only thing I can think of is try another cable if they got one and also another monitor if they got one, Also check Device Manger see if there are any yellow triangles, Could also be the Video card bit the dust.

Also with TeamViewer after you install it on your computer I would setup a TeamViewer account with them It's Free and it makes life a lot easier, Once you have your computer setup in your name connect to your parents computer and setup your account on that one.

 

looks like a high contrast theme setting. Have you tried changing theme?

 

Check for an inverted color setting in the video driver control panel.