Settings going bonkers

Trying to help my sister-in-law with her Gateway Laptop...
It's fine one day and the next all of her settings are messed up--Colors, Screen size, Fonts, Date/Time Zone, Modem needs to be reinstalled (drivers lost), MS Office needs reinstalled, IP settings gone (login info, homepage, etc.).

She's a beginner and I live 4 hours away. She just uses it to surf and email. She has MS and can't get out so sometimes the computer is all she has for enjoyment and it's very upsetting to her. I talk her through changing the settings back on the phone but after a few weeks it happens again.

The laptop was a gift from her friend. It was used and purchased from a computer store. It's been upgraded from win 95 to 98 and also I believe the graphics card and modem are not the originals. It looks like it defaults back to old settings. The original owners name (I assume) returns to her IP login screen when this happens and internet settings are not hers.

Does anyone know why it would do this? The battery seems ok.
I'm visiting her next weekend and I'm wondering how I can get rid of those old defaults?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

Since she is a beginner, I would do a full virus scan first. She may have an antivirus program, but it could be way out of date.

 

It sounds like the store didn't recondition it properly in the first place.
The only reason that Windows would lose all the hardware settings (on a laptop) is because it's either not shut down properly, thus saving the settings correctly, there could be more than one user enabled on this computer, or the battery is going dead enough to not keep settings.

 

Here is something that will be real easy to tell her over the phone, and maybe do her some good. Have her go to Start, Shutdown, have her select Restart in Dos Mode, and type in this command;

scanreg /fix <press enter>

It will take some time, depending on the computer speed. When she get the message that 'windows has repaired the registry, tell her to press enter, then reboot.
When you get there, have this program with you or download it when there. It will fit on 1 floppy.
Regcleaner

 

I agree it is a registry problem. The Laptop seems to find registry errors on some boot-ups and then restores a registry from an RB00x save that has old specs in it.
After the registry clean as above, I would rename any RB00x files to .old and see how it goes.
regards