well here goes... i got an old compaq deskpro (yes, a stupid mistake... but it was cheap) and wanted to load red hat 7.0 on it and possibly use the deskpro as a intranet server so that i could learn how to set a server up. everything loads fine but when the system tries to go into x and give me a login screen, the monitor makes a poping sound and the screen goes blank. same thing with mandrake and caldera. the screen stays blank. i have gone into the bios and disabled pnp and energy saver but that does not help. i have been going through the faq's and the only thing i have found out is that compaq did some strange things around the mbr. i have no other options open to me and would appreciate any help anyone can give concerning this. thanks jim s.