Hi.. I'm fairly new to linux.

I inherited an older laptop (Toshiba Satellite 330CDS) and have been wanting to learn about Linux, so I figured I'd give it a go on this thing. I got Knoppix loaded from the Live CD and did the knoppix-installer to get it on the HDD. That all seemed to work ok.

I then load into linux from the hard drive and KDE comes up in 640x480, even though the screen should be 800x600.
I tried the "linux screen=800x600", then when it's booting, it lists 800x600 in the modes, but KDE still comes up in 640x480.
I searched here and found a suggestion to add the mode "800x600" manually to the XF86Config and XF86Config-4 files (after backing them up, of course), but that didn't work and I set them back from the backups.
Then I searched here again and found "kxconfig", changed it in there, and did the restartx. Now it comes up in 1024x768 and the right and bottom fall of the screen, but at least the characters look right (not blocky). In the Screen resize part of Control Center, 1024x768 is the only option (where 640x480 was the only option before), but kxconfig shows 640x480 if I go back in there.

Any ideas? I've been monkeying with this for two days now and I'm pretty frustrated.. and now instead of being ugly and not having things fit right on the screen since it was too low a resolution, it looks better but is practically unusable since the panel and stuff falls off the screen.

Thanks in advance!