I have an Acer L310 that runs Vista Home. Recently, I have only been able to start in Safe Mode. When I try to start in normal mode my monitor won’t work, but when I go with Safe Mode with Networking the monitor works. How can I get around this?

Terrence, it looks like your videocard is defaulting to a resolution your monitor can’t handle. Go ahead and boot into Safe Mode and adjust your monitor’s resolution to something pretty low, then reboot and start Windows normally. It wouldn’t hurt to check Acer’s website for an updated video driver while you’re at it. From there, you can fiddle with the resolution to see how high you can set it and have your monitor still work. If you set it too high and your monitor blanks, you can just wait 15 seconds and it will revert to the previous resolution.

SUBMIT YOUR QUESTION Are flames shooting out of the back of your rig? First, grab a fire extinguisher and douse the flames. Once the pyrotechnic display has fizzled, email the doctor at doctor@maximumpc.com for advice on how to solve your technological woes.