Juan - Mucho thanks for your advice. I took a look at your references and did a fair bit more reading and then started playing and finally sought assistance from our university guru. To refresh your memory, I'm using a Compaq Presario 12XL430 (not one of the models as identified as working with Linux) with the Cyberblade i1 chipset and the trident driver. Box has a P3 600 MHz chip, 128 meg ram, 10gig eide drive, 2 usb ports, and a 24x dvd/cdrom, and JBL sound. The install configured the sound perfectly and the clock was set correctly but to the wrong time zone. Selecting the proper time zone has it keeping great time. The install recognized everything properly save the video which was a mess at 640 x 480 plaid. Ugh, unusable!! By setting the framebuffer "on" in lilo using vga=791 as per the docs, I am now able to get a very nice bright and clear 1024 x 768 display in X. However, and this is the interesting part, I can ONLY do so by booting into level 3 and then typing "startx"; if I try to boot directly into level 5 the best I can get is an 800x600 display of a 1024 x 768 screen. Stated differently, what I get is a nice crisp display with a one inch plus black border all around the panel and a display that scrolls in all 4 directions, up/down. left/right as though it wanted to fill the screen but can't. This could be seen as a good thing as it forces me to start out in text mode which is actually fine for house keeping, but I am really curious as to why this is occurring. Any ideas? Stuck a pcmcia lan card into the slot today for the first time and it was immediately recognized and it took less then five minutes to get things configured on-line via the lan. I then tried the same with my hard drive card but it wasn't recognized. I'm sure that is because I don't have a line for it in fstab but at this point I'm not sure how to properly identify it. You might have an input here. My drive is partitioned {its dual boot so my wife can use it at her elementary school also} as hda1 for Windows me (FAT32), hda7 for / (ext2), hda6 for swap (swap), and hda5 for /boot (ext2). I'm assuming that as the lan card was immediately recognized that the pcmcia socket doesn't need a line in fstab else the lan card would not have been seen. Regards, dave In any event here is one more laptop we can add to the works great list.