John Seago writes:

Having seen how easily his Red Hat went in I installed it in my computer, the installation was about a 1000% easier than......

Hey! Told ya! Everyone should listen to my wise and knowledgable advice ;-) Your two mails arrived together, John. Go and have a look in the rc.d scripts ( /etc/rc.d/)(I think) to see what happens when the computer is booting up, so if you get a nice red failed message again you can start to see where the problem is. If when booting, the log says "entering runlevel 6" (I think that is the default on Dead Rat) you want to look at rc6.d. This will show you which scripts are started up.

.....buying a hardware upgrade to make Windows/Office 2000 work.

You had a lucky escape then! Jenny.