Icons not showing at startup

This isn't for me, but for a friend who's brand new to computers and the Net. His machine is a Sony Vaio with a 1.6 GHz CPU, 1 gig of DDR memory, 32 MB of onboard video memory and WinXP. He has some kind of cable service.

Anyway he emailed me saying that when he boots up, his icons don't appear on his desktop, but they did yesterday. He also says he can't access his Hotmail account. I believe he's using MSN Explorer 7.0 to access the Web and his email. Does WinXP come with IE 6 pre-installed? If it does, I'll advise him to use that instead of MSN Explorer, as that's a **** program, from my understanding.

Does anyone have any troublshooting tips I could give him, as I've never used XP before, nor do I wish to for the time being. TIA.

 

Concerning your friends system booting up without icons displayed on the desktop; It appears from your discription that during boot up he is logging into an account that has been assigned but not yet set up. For example; if I log into my XP system using the Guest Account all that is displayed on the desktop in the default background and the icon for the recycle bin, this is because I have yet to make any of the customization settings for the Guest account. The same would happen if a created a new account but never made any changes to it.

If in fact this is what's occurring, this may also explain his inability to log into his Hotmail account, as that account is tied to his user profile.

In response to your second question; Yes, XP comes preinstalled with IE 6 and OE.

You might ask if he has more than one user account assigned to his system, if so does he sees a log-in screen when he first boots up and what account he is logging in under.

Once the computer is started I would suggest that he go to Control Panel, click on Users, and make sure that the account he uses has administrative rights.

He can also click on Help and Support from his start menu, type USER ACCOUNTS into the search box and several articles will be found that address setting up and using User Accounts in XP.

HTH

 

TY so much for your reply. I've emailed it to him to read. He's since nuked his machine and started over (I guess the Vaios come with a nuke-it disk like Compaqs), but maybe this will help him if he runs into problems in the future.

 

Your welcome. Thanks for writing back to let us know what action was taken.