Long story short, I sat on a laptop. It was a thinkpad 560. I bought another one on ebay. Turns out the display is one inch smaller than the old one. I put the hard drive from the old one into the new one, and everything goes fine until windows boots. The screen is unreadable. I know it's not the screen because the windows 98 boot logo displays fine. I have a pc-to-tv adapter (thank goodness), and I tried updating the display driver, but it picked the same one. The driver is a trident something or other. Was there a different driver for the 11" screen, or am I missing the problem?

The harddrive you installed has the correct driver for the old laptop, not the current one.

Try booting into Safe Mode (F8) at startup. Once there update the drivers to the correct ones. I suggest you go to the manufacturers website and download ALL the drivers for that laptop because they may all be wrong.

It's the exact same model except for the display. I'm guessing they redid the model with a different display company. I was expecting a whole bunch of "new hardware found" for the motherboard and system resources, but none of that, so... Thanks for the safe mode suggestion, I feel dumb now. I can get the thing to display on my tv. I'm not as stupid as you must be thinking of me, I expected that the display driver would still work because there's only one driver for the model. I don't know how I'm going to get it to work, even in safe mode...

Safe Mode uses VGA standards using a generic VGA driver. The resolution may be set higher than the graphics is capable of displaying.

Yes. Indeed. I remembered this fact from the time when I fixed up the first one from ebay. Anywho, my geniousness has fixed it. I had to hack the driver. Thanks for the help, OtheHill.

Don't know is I helped but your welcome.