Mostly from accessing options in the System Preferences. I get boxes filled with capital A's instead of English text, as if the font is not accessable.
You may have a corrupt font. Have you installed any fonts lately?
Not as far as I know. The computer went through the hard drive replacement program in order for it to even run Mountain Lion. The Apple Store completed the install. Computer should theroretically be just like it came out of the box.
Close all running applications. From an administrator account, open the Terminal app and enter the following command. You can also copy/paste it from here into the Terminal window:
sudo atsutil databases -remove
Terminal will then ask for your admin password. As you type, it will not show anything, so be sure to enter it correctly.
This removes all font cache files. Both for the system and the current user font cache files. After running the command, close Terminal and immediately restart your Mac.
I would, but I don't know what the admin password is. The computer only has one account, but it looks like they changed the admin password on me without telling me what it was.
It also looks like there was, indeed, fonts installed. Will using this command delete the third party fonts that were added?
No, it just clears all font cache files for the logged in user account, and the system's font cache files.
Any system dialog boxes procured in Mountain Lion show up as unreadable text. How do I correct this?
