Alright, here we go:

I have my old workhorse of a laptop, the Compaq Armada 4220T, which I reserected from the dead. origonally, it had a 6.4gb HDD, but almost half of it was dead. I cut the part that was bad into it's own partition, and installed Windows 98se on it. That worked...for about 3 months. so I purchaced a New Toshiba MK2018GAP 20gb HDD. It was registering only to 7.15gb. so, I thought it was defective, and was about to send it back, until I got a laptop HDD adapter for $3.00, and hooked it up to my dad's Windows XP box, and ran my trusty Knoppix 3.7 12-8-2004 build CD, booted, and I ran QTparted, and she found her right away. there she was, 18.16gb (some of it is taken away fro drive structer). well, I installed Knoppix on the HDD, and threw (well, gently placed) it in my laptop. It booted fine, and then we hit a snag.

at the loading screen, the info spilled over past the monitor. WTH? the fun didnt stop there. in the KDe, she was spilled over not only vertically, but horizontally. That, plus the internal mouse (trackball) didn't work AT ALL. Wierd, beacuse during loading, it said found generic PS/2 mous at dev/psaux. so I thought, maybe it's borked. I restarted the beast, and hooked up my old Logitech Model M-C48 grey wheel PS/2 mouse to the port, and she loaded. SAME PROBLEM!! I rebooted AGAIN, and tried the inland optical PS/2 wheel mouse from my dad's computer, which I KNOW works, because it works just fine when I loaded the KDE, and works flawlesly. Then, I rebooted again, and got my old trusty Microsoft Serial Mouse 2.0A, back when Microsoft made quality products. well, hardware, at least.

So, here I sit, typing this at 9:30, and I need a solution. fast. oh, before I forget, here are the specs:

Compaq Armada 4220T
Pentium 266mhz, though Knoppix claims it is a Mobile Pentium @ 287mhz.
64mb ram (32mb internal, 16mbx2 dimm sticks)
Toshiba MK2018GAP 20gb HDD
internal 1.44mb floppy drive
24x CD-ROM (can't read CD-Rs or CD-RWs, that's why I cant boot Knoppix off the laptop, and have to do it on my dad's rig.)
Ports:
1x RCA video out
1x VGA 15-pin monitor port
1x 25-pin printer port
1x 9-pin serial port
1x PS/2 mouse/keyboard port
2x PCMCIA card slots
1st card slot: Compaq brand CF card PCMCIA adapter, filled with 128mb Sandisk CF card
2nd card slot: 3Com Etherlink III ethernet card
Knoppix v3.7 build: 2004-08-12 (December 12th, 2004).

that's about it. thanks for ALL the help, in advance. -digital