After installing broadband internet, the Internet Explorer home page will not completely display on the screen, and the text letters seem more spaced out. In order to use the Search function on the home page I need to scroll across the screen to click the ‘Search’ button. How can I get the entire homepage to properly display on the screen?

To summarise your question, it seems that the home page is not displaying in the Internet Explorer browser window, but is instead spilling outside the right boundary of the window, resulting in horizontal scroll. First, has the Internet Explorer home page changed as a result of having broadband installed? Some service providers will automatically set their web site as the default home page when their internet service is installed. Should this be the case, it is possible the new home page is designed for a higher display resolution. As an example, many new websites are designed at 1024 pixels wide. This means it will fill the entire screen if your screen resolution is set to such a resolution (commonly 1024 x 786). However, older machines may only support a screen resolution of 800 x 600 (i.e. 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall). Do the maths and you will see a website designed at 1024 width will not display properly on a computer running at 800 width. So, there will be horizontal scroll (of 224 pixels). Should this be the case, there isn’t much you can do to resolve the issue. However, it shouldn’t affect your ability to use other websites since your computer has likely always been running at this resolution, and you didn’t mention problems with any other sites.

However, if you are using the same home page as prior to broadband being installed, or the same problem occurs on other websites (which previously displayed correctly) then something has gone awry. The first possibility is the entire computer screen resolution has been changed. Have you noticed if the computer display in Windows has larger icons than before, and in general everything is larger? If so, this is an indication that the system display resolution has been decreased. To resolve this issue you will need to increase the resolution. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Control Panel’. In the window that appears, open the ‘Display’ control panel (you may need to first click the ‘Appearance and Themes’ control panel). In the next window, click the ‘Settings’ tab. You will see an option titled ‘Screen resolution’. Try increasing this one notch, and then click ‘Apply’. The screen will briefly go blank, and then it should return at the new resolution. If all looks fine, then click OK to accept the changes. However, if the screen stays blank don’t panic - do nothing! There is an automatic timeout after 15 seconds, after which Windows assumes something has gone wrong and will return you to the previously working resolution. If this happens, it indicates the monitor does not support that resolution and, most likely, any higher resolutions. Therefore, you should not try any other higher resolutions, since they probably won’t work. In this case, it seems that the resolution is not the cause of the problem.

The next possible cause is the font size in Internet Explorer has been increased, causing web site text to be increased and making the web pages bigger so they will not fit on the screen. This scenario is even more likely, since you commented that the letters are more spaced-out on screen. Open Internet Explorer and go to the ‘View’ menu > ‘Text Size’. Make sure the text size is set to ‘Medium’. This will display the text in the Internet Explorer window at the normal size.