Cousin calling me with problems with his mac, help?

[tennismanclay]

My cousin just called me and told me of some problems hes having with his 6 month old macbook. The first thing he said was that everything he clicks on, it says it, like when he clicks on itunes it actually says itunes. Is there some option in system preferences to turn this off? The next thing he said was that when he hits the volume keys, widgets come up. How do you change that? And lastly, after i told him to try a restart, he says when he tries to restart, there are 2 log out buttons, 2 restart buttons and 2 shutdown buttons. Little wierd? huh.

Anyways any help would be appreciated, im going to have to call him later tonight and hopefully tell him what to do about these problems.

-Clay

 

[illegallydead]

The speaking thing is just a problem with accessibility options. Something having to do with visually impaired navigation or something. That should be an easy fix.
The volume keys... likely something got re-mapped on the keyboard. Has he tried pushing other buttons and seeing if they too have different results?

Not sure on the login thing.

Has someone he knows messed around with his system? This sounds like someone just trying to f*ck with him. If all else fails, tell him to take it to an Apple store. They will be glad to help and are plenty experienced with users who don't know how to fix their own machines (which kind of gives Mac users a bad name, that a good percentage of them don't know how to fix even basic things)

 

[QuarterSwede]

You can always use iChat to screen share with him if you're both running Leopard. At least that way you can try to see/fix what's happening. I've done it with my father 1600 miles away and it works beautifully.

 

[5280m]

All of those can be changed through system preferences.

 

[t0mat0]

Whats the program by fog media - could help you out - remote help, if you can't get ichat working