Jonathon, Looks like it might be a resource allocation problem. From command line try: "lspci -v | less" for console display or "lspci -v > lspci.txt" to dump to text file. Looks kind of intimidating to start with, look for error messages, I/O or IRQ conflicts. Some PCI will normally share same IRQ though. A quick way to try another distro would be Knoppix. http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html It boots off the CD into RAM, doesn't touch the HD. Debian based. If it works, run lspci on it, see what it comes back with. HTH, Bob Jonathon Jongsma wrote: > hmm, > Thanks for the suggestions. didn't seem to do the trick though. When I > installed mandrake, i did select intel 845 (which i think is what i > have). I tried vesa, and that didn't seem to help. Another thing that > i didn't notice before. when I boot up, it gives me this error: > > PCI: Device 00:1f.1 not available because of resource collisions > > Could that be the video card?? (if you can't tell, i'm not much of a > hardware guy). > any help would be appreciated. Also -- should I try another > distribution? Say Red Hat? > > Jonathon