I had been playing around with running Debian Linux on a partition
on my hard drive along with Windows Millennium Edition on the
another. I had been having trouble with Linux detecting some of the
hardware. I went into Setup and restored the default settings to
see if that would help with hardware detection. When I rebooted I
noticed that the display was very ragged during the text portion of
the Grub Boot Loader and the display when Linux was detecting
hardware. The initial screen with the Compaq logo always looked
sharp but the next screen always produced the fuzzy display.

During my several days of troubleshooting the problem with Google
searches, I happened upon a line in one of the online Compaq manuals
that hitting the FN key and the letter "T" serves to toggles the
screen back and forth between full screen and reduced screen. I hit
the key combination and the screen sharpened up. When you are
booting into a graphics environment, you might not notice that the
display was at 800 by 600 resolution rather than 1024 by 768 during
the short text-based portion during Windows startup. All the other
keys which work along with the FN key have markings to indicate what
they do. I missed that one since there were no markings.

Now if I can only get my ESS 1869 sound card to work in Linux, I
would be satisfied.

--
Earl F. Parrish