Pls help before I BBQ this notebook.......

-Thank you for your post. Unfortunately, it is not likely to get the attention it deserves in the Discussion forum. Please re-post to the Questions forum by selecting the "Ask a Question" button. You may copy and paste your content to there.

Many do not read the Discussions forum and taking this step helps to insure that your Question gets the attention it deserves.
Unfortunately, there is currently no way to delete the original post in the Discussions forum. That is understood by all. However, if you want, you can put a link in it to the new posting in the Questions Forum.

Please do not forget to rate answers that you find helpful as being so.

Good Luck!

Try F8 just after bios, (where you have the option of "safe mode") and see if you have an option for "enable VGA", or something like that, and choose that. If that works you will need to install video drivers.

I agree with shawn@..., a safe-mode (F8) reboot will tell if
the installation succeeded and then you only need the
CDROM which came with the laptop to install drivers. But you
will need to consider that if that fails to improve the
situation, you will have to reload XP SP2 and do the optional
slow (low level) hard disk drive reformat, ideally in NTFS.
Latops get whacked a lot, and you may have lost a system
disk sector.